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how little our kids should know in “A Minimum
Competence to all, and to all a Good Night!”
Essays such as “Maximum Brain Dysfunction”
and “All-Purpose Gobbledygook” speak for
themselves. He levels his shaft at the illogical, the
faddish, and the foolish.
Behind, beyond, around, and under Mitchell’s
vivacious wit lurks a serious message. It is easy to
poke fun at the manglers of language and thought:
despite our knowing superiority, however, those
manglers, who cannot read or write or think, are
ruining our language, our schools, our institutions,
our society. Those who care about these things, as
Mitchell does—read and heed.
Mitchell’s readers say it—
“If others could offer as much insight into politics
and economics as Richard Mitchell does into
education, we might find the path to world peace
and prosperity. Of course, if more people would
heed the Underground Grammarian’s advice, our
future leaders might actually learn something
useful about politics and economics.”
—Bob Verdun
“Mitchell is invaluable. Also, he’s enormously
entertaining.”
—Clifton Fadimon
“These pieces, articulate, intelligent, often wildly
funny, and frequently dazzling, spring from a
splendid mind, tuned to just the right pitch, and
fired with an angry passion. . . .”
—From the Introduction by
Thomas H. Middleton
Richard Mitchell is author, editor, printer, and
assistant circulation manager of The Underground
Grammarian, a journal that is the frequent subject
of comment and consternation in The New York
Times, Time magazine, and The Wall Street
Journal.
In The Leaning Tower of Babel Mitchell has
gathered together a sparkling collection of the best
pieces from The Underground Grammarian. In
“Hopefully, We Could Care Less” he probes the
nature of contemporary language. He ponders the
sanity of spending millions to determine exactly
“…a master diagnostician of the current grave
disease in education. His commonsense solutions
for the rehabilitation of our schools are worthy of
the attention of parents, students, administrators,
educators, government officials, and all concerned
citizens. Reading his essays is not only
enlightening, but thoroughly enjoyable.”
—Lois De Bakey
“The Underground Grammarian often makes me
writhe with self-doubt and guilt, yet
masochistically I ingest each issue. Without it, life
might be worth living again, but much more
boring. UG is never polite, never gentle, never
nice, and never dull.”
—Roy Meador
Richard Mitchell, professor of English at
Glassboro State College, is also author of Less
Than Words Can Say and The Graves of
Academe.
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Introduction:
Mitchell’s Muse
by
Thomas H. Middleton
I'VE
been lucky enough to have had THE
UNDERGROUND GRAMMARIAN sent to me
since early in its history, and I have kept all the
issues sequestered in a manila folder in one of the
bookshelves in my office. On the sound theory
that anything as good as Richard Mitchell's
homespun product should be broadcast rather than
sequestered, I have on occasion lent my collection
to worthy friends, but only after securing the
transaction with all their credit cards and all the
keys to all their cars.
When I find a new UNDERGROUND
GRAMMARIAN in my mailbox, I welcome it as I
suppose some people—devoted fans of different
drummers—welcome the latest Field and Stream,
Cosmopolitan, or Playboy.
As
I
recall,
THE
UNDERGROUND
GRAMMARIAN began as a local organ whose
purpose was to stamp out the rotten writing and
bubbleheaded thinking of some of the staff and
students at Glassboro State College in Glassboro,
New Jersey. The first few issues in my files seem
to deal almost exclusively with the problems of
Glassboro. Of course, Glassboro State's problems
were a microcosm of the slough that the English
language had slid into nationwide; so it was
inevitable that these gems would quickly attract
notice, first in academic circles, then among all
the host who care about language.
The second issue of THE UNDERGROUND
GRAMMARIAN (volume one, number two,
February 1977) states its goals: "THE
UNDERGROUND GRAMMARIAN does not seek
to educate anyone. We intend rather to ridicule,
humiliate, and infuriate those who abuse our
language not so that they will do better but so that
they will stop using language entirely or at least
go away. There are callings in which the abuse of
English doesn't matter; ours isn't one of them."
Clearly, this early edition is addressed to what
Mitchell in the title of one of his books has called
"The Graves of Academe."
In this same second issue, he announces the
inauguration of the Wind-up Toy Award, which
"is presented to those who use advisement in
public. Input and interface as well as thrust will
also earn Wind-up Toy Awards. These words
might be appropriate in private between
consenting adults. The award indicates our
recognition of those talents best suited to sellers of
wind-up toys in the streets."
I first met Richard Mitchell when he came from
the East Coast out here to Los Angeles to appear
on the Johnny Carson show. We had had a bit of
correspondence, and I'd told him I'd like to meet
him if he ever traveled to the West. I planted
myself at the bar of his hotel, the Sheraton
Universal, and he came in almost immediately.
We had a couple of drinks and a very congenial
chat, in the course of which I complimented him
on his UNDERGROUND GRAMMARIAN essays. I
said that each of them was a masterpiece. He
instantly denied authorship of them. "It's a muse,"
he said. "Something out there comes down and
guides my hand."
I laughed, but he insisted that it was so. He said
that surely I must have written columns that
seemed to write themselves. I owned that on rare
occasions I had—usually when I was mad as hell
about something—and I admitted that I had
frequently written letters to the editor and letters
of complaint to offending merchants and
manufacturers, and that those letters flowed
effortlessly from a hand that almost seemed not
my own.
"Exactly," he said.
So there you are. THE UNDERGROUND
GRAMMARIAN will have great appeal for anyone
who simply loves good writing, for the writing in
these articles is superb. Moreover, these pieces,
articulate, intelligent, often wildly funny, and
frequently dazzling, spring from a splendid mind,
tuned to just the right pitch, and fired with an
angry passion under the supernatural control of
Mitchell's muse.
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I
On The
Nature of Language
Hopefully, We Could Care Less
The shame of speaking unskilfully were
small if the tongue onely thereby were
disgrac’d: But as the Image of a King in his
Seale ill-represented is not so much a
blemish to the waxe, or the Signet that
seal’d it, as to the Prince it representeth, so
disordered speech is not so much injury to
the lips that give it forth, as to the
disproportion and incoherence of things in
themselves, so negligently expressed.
Neither can his Mind be thought to be in
Tune, whose words do jarre; nor his reason
in frame, whose sentence is preposterous;
nor his Elocution clear and perfect, whose
utterance breaks itself into fragments and
uncertainties. Negligent speech doth not
onely discredit the person of the Speaker,
but it discrediteth the opinion of his reason
and judgement; it discrediteth the force and
uniformity of the matter and substance. If it
be so then in words, which fly and ‘scape
censure, and where one good Phrase asks
pardon for many incongruities and faults,
how then shall he be thought wise whose
penning is thin and shallow? How shall you
look for wit from him whose leasure and
head, assisted with the examination of his
eyes, yeeld you no life or sharpnesse in his
writing?
READERS often ask about the source of the
elegant and old-fashioned sentence that appears
somewhere in almost every issue. It is from
Timber, or, Discoveries made upon Men and
Matters, by Ben Jonson (1573?-1637). It was to
Jonson, habitué of the Sun, the Dog, and the
Triple Tun, that Robert Herrick, another such,
addressed his not entirely frivolous prayer:
“Candles I’ll give to thee, and a new altar; and
thou, Saint Ben, shalt be writ in my psalter.” The
words of the wise are as goads, and we might all
grow more thoughtful through declaiming, in
solemn ritual, before we put a word on paper:
“Neither can his mind be thought to be in Tune...”
And if you’d like to be more fussy than we, you
can add the part that we leave out: “nor his
Elocution clear and perfect, whose utterance
breaks itself into fragments and uncertainties. “
Many of our readers are more fussy than we.
They often write, asking why we don’t “do
something” about people whose utterance breaks
itself all too regularly and predictably into
fragments and uncertainties. Culprits most
frequently indicted are teenagers, television
reporters—especially sports reporters, athletes
answering silly questions put by television sports
reporters, government functionaries, and Howard
Cosell. There seems to be a pattern there.
However, while the abolition of television,
athletics, and teenagers would, of course, bring
many happy returns, none of them would be
linguistic. And we would, in any case, still be left
with the government functionaries. And everyone
else.
Our fussy readers are mostly too astute to
complain about the obvious nonsense of social
amenity, although some of them are saddened
when instructed to have a nice day, or to hear,
from some putative grown-up on the telephone,
“Bye-bye.” They begin to itch when they hear
things like “irregardless,” “between you and I,”
and the much castigated but apparently invincible
“hopefully.” They are exasperated, at the least, to
hear that style of discourse in which not only
young people but also many entertainers
(including athletes), artsy-craftsy folk, populistical
professors, and even some vegetarians, seem
forever trapped, the wandering recitation
copiously punctuated with “see?” “like,” and
“y’know.”
Hopefully, we could care less about such things,
and hopefully is exactly how we would care less if
we did care less. We care a little, just enough to
preclude hope, but not enough to make us want to
“do something.”
There is a big difference between talk and
writing. They are not merely optional ways of
expressing the same substance. Talking is
normally a social act; writing, unless it is simply
copying the given, must be private. It needs the
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“leasure and head, assisted with the examination
of the eyes,” time, solitude, a visible record, and
attention.
How we speak, in the press of the moment, is
usually the result of habit. How we write, in
solitary thoughtfulness, can be the result of
choice. Our educationists are socializers with
political intentions. They fear the choices of the
solitary mind, which is why they prefer “teaching
materials” to a book by a person, and they
imagine understanding in the collective, which is
why they “teach” by rap session and send out
questionnaires. If you nag about speech habits that
annoy you, those people will gladly offer
“literacy” through other habits inculcated by more
courses
in
speech
and
interpersonal
communication.
The substitution of genteel habits for vulgar
habits is not education. It’s just a different
indoctrination. So try to put Howard Cosell like
out of your mind, you know?
[V:7, October 1981]
The Leaning Tower of Babel
____________________
A Little Heavy Thinking
from Gerald W. Brown
Professor of Education
California State University
How can we justify eight years of study of a
foreign language when the foreign travel of the
student may (probably ten years later) be in an
entirely different sphere?
How can we justify intensive study of a foreign
language when our “track record” in achieving
fluency is so poor?
How can we justify the study of foreign
language when such a large percentage of our
population never meets up with a native speaker?
Not only does the student get no practice, but also
he acquires no motivation.
Some attention should be given to [the] claim
that the failure to study a foreign language is [a]
detriment
to
international
understanding.
Although such a statement would be difficult to
demonstrate one way or the other, it is difficult to
see how a knowledge of French would help
understanding of the international situation in
China, Japan, etc.
In my own sphere the people who are
multilingual do not stand out as having a
significant international understanding nor as
educated men. I admit that monolingualism may
be bad for business, and business may very well
provide opportunities for their employees to learn,
in a commercial language school, the specific
language they need at the specific time they need
it. Three essentials of language study come
together at that point: (1) an able learner, (2)
motivation to study, and (3) a ready opportunity to
put the study into practice.
As for teaching every student in our schools and
colleges a second language, how are we doing
with English?
HERE at Glassboro State, we have no language
requirements. Nor do we have any foreign
language requirements. This may seem strange to
someone out in the world, but most of us think it a
very good and proper thing. In fact, to suggest the
possibility of a language requirement around here
is like asking for a bacon sandwich at a bar
mitzvah in Brooklyn.
There are—let’s face it—certain subjects that
are just not suitable for study in the schools, and
one of them is foreign language. The study of any
foreign language is an egregiously unhumanistic
enterprise in which even good students can
actually make an indubitable error! That’s
humiliating and undemocratic. The students who
make many errors will suffer regular and
irretrievable diminutions of self-esteem, and those
who make only a few will stand in danger of
becoming elitists. Those are risks that we cannot
and will not take, especially with all those earnest
young people who truly love children and,
resisting the lure of the lucrative but inhumane
careers that they might have found in commerce
and technology, have come to us to be made into
professionals of schoolteachering.
And fortunately, while we do still permit the
study of a few foreign languages here, we find
that most of our incipient schoolteachers don’t
even need to be advised to choose Puppetry
Workshop or the History of Jazz rather than
French or German as what we call “humanities
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electives.” They know a humanity when they see
one.
There’s nothing humane about irregular verbs,
and an obsession with foreign language is even
more dehumanizing for the teachers than for the
students. The teachers are supposed to know the
irregular verbs. And the case endings—all of
them. And the use of the imperfect subjunctive.
And thousands of un-American idioms. You can
be pretty damn sure that any teacher who is
actually an expert in some foreign language has
put more effort into rote learning than into relating
to self and others, and will almost certainly be
more interested in the mere facts of a narrow
discipline of dubious relevance than in the true
goals of education: appreciation, awareness,
global and/or environmental consciousness, and
rap sessions on death and Gay Rights. We are not
the least bit interested in turning out that sort of
teacher, thank you.
And furthermore, these people who indulge in
foreign language study often pick up some uppity,
anti-social notions about language itself. They
start getting persnickety about what they are
pleased to call “accuracy,” and they snootily
pretend that they can’t understand what it means
to experientially enhance some aspects of
remediation implementation in the sphere of
interpersonal communication, which tells you how
little they really care about self-expression and
creativity, a couple of our other true goals.
But there’s nothing to worry about. Our
Division of Professional Studies—an airborn
division at that—will see to it that there is never a
foreign language requirement here. Why, just last
year, when our little foreign language department
proposed a few reading courses that just might,
some day, be required by a couple of other little
departments with no discernible future and thus
little to lose, our professionals, who make the
rules for the curriculum committee, thank
goodness, nipped that little old foot in the door
right in the little old bud. Those ivory tower
foreign language teachers had neglected (heh heh)
to list the expected student outcomes of foreign
language reading courses! You see? The teachers
themselves can’t find a good excuse for studying
foreign languages.
However, while there is no danger of an
eruption of foreign language study at Glassboro,
trouble looms elsewhere in Academe. We have
heard reports of schools, and some of them public
schools, once again offering courses in Latin! And
of students actually taking them instead of
alternative lifestyle education or the poetry of
rock and roll. And, even worse, along comes a
certain Cynthia Parsons, suggesting (we guess), in
the Christian Science Monitor, that teachers
should study foreign languages as part of their
training! Can you believe it? How long do you
suppose our teacher academy, or any other, could
survive such a bizarre requirement? Hell, if our
teacher trainees were that kind of people, the kind
who memorize and fuss about trivial details, they
wouldn’t make very good teachers, now would
they? And many of them probably wouldn’t even
have to become teachers!
We haven’t actually read Cynthia Parsons’
essay, of course, and we’re not about to. We’ve
heard it all before. Besides, we have read Gerald
W. Brown’s cogent answer to Parsons, excerpts
from which we have reprinted below for your
edification.
That Brown is a man with plenty on the sphere.
Notice how wisely he eschews any vain
discussion of that tired old elitist notion that the
study of foreign language has some sort of effect
on the habits and discipline of the mind. He sticks
to the facts. And it is a fact, by golly, that many of
those kids suckered into foreign language study
could find themselves, ten years later, if then, in
that entirely different sphere. And for the hapless
student of Latin, it could take even longer.
By the same logic—and it’s high time that we
started paying it more than lip service—we’ve
been wasting a lot of time, time that could be
devoted to career education, on stuff like physics
and trigonometry. We have, to be sure, seen to it
that very few students will actually take such
courses, but their mere existence is a continuous
drain on energies and funds that could better be
spent in truly humanistic enterprises. How many
of our students, after all, will ever end up, never
mind in ten years, in physics spheres or
trigonometry spheres?
And any who do can always, as Brown correctly
points out in the case of those few who choose to
learn some foreign language purely for personal
profit, learn all the physics or trigonometry they
please, along with any other narrow specialization
that suits them, at one of those commercial
schools. The commercial schools do not share our
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high standards. They’ll teach anything, anything
at all, without the least concern for its social
utility or its potential for creativity enhancement
or even its suitability for mainstreaming. All they
do is teach. They don’t even care about behavioral
objectives.
And, as only a professor of education could,
Brown explodes
the old “international
understanding” myth by discovering that a
knowledge of French will not help you with the
international situation in China. Or even Japan.
Professors of education know all about
international understanding and the right way to
foster it. They’re the ones who showed us how to
enhance intercultural multi-ethnic appreciation
through folk-dances of many lands, and how to
teach children to relate to the Eskimo experience
by chewing blubber.
Brown makes many fine points, but his last is
his best. What is it with you laymen? We’ve
already shown you that we’re not even teaching
English, and here you are nagging us to teach
some ridiculous foreign languages! And if, as
Brown astutely reminds us, our poor track record
in achieving fluency proves that it is pointless to
teach a foreign language for eight years, what
does our track record in twelve years of teaching
English prove?
Brown is right. If you want your kids to learn
narrow academic specializations, why don’t you
just send them to commercial schools? Our
business is quality education.
[V:9, December 1981]
The Proud Walkers
When I hear the hypercritical quarreling
about grammar and style, the position of the
particles etc., etc., stretching or contracting
every speaker to certain rules, … I see they
forget that the first requisite and rule is that
expression shall be vital and natural, as
much as the voice of a brute, or an
interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and
last of all, artificial or father tongue.
Essentially, your truest poetical sentence is
as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat. The
grammarian is often one who can neither cry
nor laugh, yet thinks he can express human
emotions. So the posture-masters tell you
how you shall walk, . . . but so the beautiful
walkers are not made.
THOSE are Thoreau’s words, and we wish that
we had read them years ago, instead of just last
week. It has taken us years to reach an
understanding that Thoreau could have given us in
less than a minute. No matter how hard you try to
be thoughtful, ignorance must set you to
reinventing the wheel.
We once did fuss a bit over “particles, etc.,
etc.,” but even then we held that the splitting of
infinitives, for instance, was, like the celibacy of
the clergy, a matter of discipline rather than
doctrine. We have not been deaf to the lamb’s
bleat. “It is often true,” we have said, “that the
language of the unschooled [so unlike the
language of the schoolers] is clear, accurate,
powerful, and even beautiful, for those merits do
not depend on tricks of grammar.” And we have
often lacerated the inane or mendacious language
of the schoolers who can not achieve any one of
those merits even when they have achieved the
“basic minimum competency” thought suitable to
their kind.
So we are far less chastened than encouraged
and enlightened by Thoreau’s words. He has
given us the key, the mot so juste that we
suddenly remember that juste is a word that goes
with justice. How better can we understand the
affected and improbable language of the
educationist than as the unwittingly ludicrous
display of the smug posture-master?
But Thoreau gives even us more. The proper
work of the wise is surprisingly often nothing
more than providing the rest of us with exactly the
right words. So it is that new ways of
understanding come forth, for understanding is
the making of statements, and statements about
statements. In one happy phrase, Thoreau has
made the fine and unexpected distinction between
Mother Tongue, a concept so familiar that we
usually don’t stop to think about what we might
take it to mean, and the unfamiliar Farther
Tongue, which has always been lurking in the
possibilities of language. Thinking, after all, is
nothing more than rummaging about in the
possibilities of language. And the thinker is one
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who regularly answers the question that ordinarily
puts an end to thought: What more can I say?
Accordingly, we have gone rummaging
through back issues looking for examples through
which we might understand that “artificial or
father tongue.” It was easy. We quickly found
these three:
The findings suggest that psychosexuality constructs
of agency/communion can be meaningfully
operationalized to reflect the degree of
psychosexuality integration, with different modes of
manifestations
and
different
correlates
of
interpersonal behavior associated with various levels
on the integration continuum.
The multiple issues raised suggests that a particular
type of structure and composition…is required.
Thus, the accomplishment of the aforementioned
aims require that the meeting be from a more
comprehensive perspective.
Linguistics has become a magic word in language
instruction of today. Vigorous activity …has
stretched linguistics beyond…esoteric enclaves…and
brought it cascading down through the high school
and elementary grades.
The first of those passages is the prissy
pirouette of the practiced posture-master. Ah,
what skills. How prettily he prances from the
operationalization of constructs to the reflection of
the degree of integration, and gracefully glides on
into modes of manifestation and correlates
associated with levels on the continuum. Ah, how
smart he must be. And how professional. How
proud of him his mother must be, although
probably not, we’d be willing to wager, nearly as
proud of him as he is of himself. The attribute that
always leaks out of such writing is that supposed
virtue that educationists have chosen, ignoring
logic in the service of sentimentality, as both a
requisite to education and its best reward—Selfesteem.
The voice of that passage, however, is not just
the voice of self-esteem. It is the voice of a man
full of self-esteem. It is the pompous voice of selfawarded authority, the voice of command, the
mighty voice from “above,” in which no decent
human should speak. It is Father Tongue.
The second passage is an example of failed
Father Tongue. Close, but no cigar. The writer is
evidently an apprentice posture-master. He does
want to strut with the proud walkers, but he keeps
on stumbling because he hasn’t learned to tie his
shoelaces. He is Huxley’s snotty little seminarian,
who dresses up in the bishop’s flashy regalia. His
grammatical gaucheries would be inconsequential
if his language were “vital and natural,” but in the
context of that pretentious jargon, they are
laughable calamities.
The third writer’s just a little boy who thinks it
would be really neat to grow up to be a posturemaster some day. So far, he has neither the words
nor the tune, but he is quite as eater to be a proud
walker as Tom Sawyer is to be a highwayman,
who will hold his victims for “ransom,” as it says
“in the books,” even though he has never felt the
need to stop and reckon what that means.
Our habitual scrutiny of language has confirmed
us in sexism. Men and women are different,
essentially and (we hope) ineradicably. Men don’t
grow up. Pure seriousness seizes only a few of
them, and only from time to time. They pretend to
be something. They pretend to be sages or
soldiers, or anything in between. Even the most
witless and inept can find some system, made by
men and for men, that will pay him for pretending
to be a superintendent of schools, or a language
arts facilitator, or something. And the score is kept
in those sad games not by what one gets done, but
by how one plays, which means, among other
things, doing one’s “work” exclusively in Father
Tongue.
The crusty Dr. Johnson, in one of his most
outrageous wisecracks, opined that listening to a
woman preaching a sermon would be like
watching a dog walking on its hind legs. We
would be astonished not that she might do it well,
but that she does it at all. Tsk, we used to think.
That is not a nice thing to say. We were wrong. In
fact, nice is exactly what it is—look it up, if you
must—for it makes a fine and subtle distinction.
Johnson knew the difference between Father
Tongue and Mother Tongue. He knew what he
meant by “preaching,” an exercise in the artificial
language used by men for saying exactly what
they are supposed to say. Misogynist though he
was, Johnson knew that no woman, uncompelled,
would ever do such a thing.
Yes, we do know that there are dippy women
who want to speak Father Tongue, who
understand no more than most men how pitiable a
display they make of their captivity, for it is
captivity, not liberation. A man who speaks
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Mother Tongue can make his own place. A
woman who speaks Father Tongue might fill a
vacancy in the ranks of the proud walkers. And
she’d better have good, strong hind legs.
[VI:5, May 1982]
To be to Some chewed Books
Tasted Are Swallowed to digested,
and Others be, and Some be Few
NEVER spoken truer were words. And out are to
quickly some spat be. Unfortunately, however, the
natural good sense which instructs even very
small children to spew noxious substances clean
across the room is suppressed in the schools as
anti-social and little conducive to the self-esteem
of the teachers. The wretched little tykes, once the
iron door of the schoolhouse clangs shut behind
them, are required by law to swallow everything
fed them by the bold, innovative thrusters who
make up the ever-changing menu. Peanut butter
guacamole yesterday, potato chips in aspic
tomorrow, but never a smidgen of jam today.
Nevertheless,
however
improbable
and
nauseous their concoctions, it is usually possible
to figure out what it is that they either imagine or
pretend that they will accomplish. But now, in an
unbook called Expressways, a sixth-grade
“reading” text, we have a disgusting mess of
unidentifiable substance whose supposed purpose
we cannot even begin to guess.
It pretends to be an exercise in “correcting word
order,” and begins by asserting that “word order
affects the meaning of a sentence,” as some
precocious (and thus, as you will see, disruptive)
children will have noticed even before they
reached the sixth grade. The exercise asks the
students to do something about some supposedly
garbled sentences. Some of them actually are
garbled:
magician a Merlin was
Arthur enchanted an stone of pulled out
sword of
Not quite as much fun as a barrel of monkeys,
perhaps, but close. Even the dullest students
should be able, as instructed, to “rewrite each
group of words to make a clear and sensible
sentence.” But why, dammit? Why?
Is this what those educationists mean by
“problem-solving”? Do they imagine, or pretend,
that a garbled sentence is a “problem” for which
all readers must be prepared lest they fail to
comprehend deliberate distortions? Is it some
“life-skill” enhancement intended to insure that
the students will still be able to check the right
boxes on comprehension tests when all the
printers have gone mad? Are students, in fact,
likely to write such garbled sentences?
To make a bad thing worse, the concocters of
this silliness can’t even garble skillfully. Having
vouchsafed that “word order affects the meaning
of a sentence,” and having asked that students
assemble “clear and sensible sentences” from
“groups of words” that could never occur
naturally, these reading experts proceed to dream
up “problems” of this kind:
the knights made out of marble sat at a
round table
persons in distress rescued the knights
some knights went in search of holy objects
on quests
Try now to imagine the plight of those unlucky
sixth graders—there are plenty of them—who can
see, as anyone but a reading expert might, that
those “groups of words” are “clear and sensible.”
If there is anything at all “wrong” about them, it is
only that they will not win approval from the
teacher, who can easily discover, by looking it up
in the handy teacher’s guide that comes with
Expressways, that those clear and sensible
sentences are not the clear and sensible sentences
that the reading experts had in mind, not the
“correct” solutions to “problems” that would
never have existed in the first place if it weren’t
for the fact that the reading experts always need
tricky new gimmicks to put in their unbooks.
The exercise pretends to ask a question about
grammar, the system of principles by which we
all, sixth-grade children included, can and do form
any of an infinite number of possible sentences,
including the three supposed “problems” cited
above. But in fact, it asks a question to be
answered out of that minimal kind of reading that
is really nothing more than the reception of
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communication. And, probably for the
remediation of those obstinate students who
persist in suspecting that it is by form, not content,
that a sentence is a sentence, there is a postscript
to all this absurdity. It’s called “Interaction”:
Make up your own scrambled sentences
about how Merlin could help you. Have a
classmate unscramble your sentences.
It’s not enough, you see, although it is required,
that educationists commit nonsense. They are, as
they are always saying, such giving and sharing
people. And when they commit nonsense,
everyone commits nonsense.
___________
Lazy over brown the jumped
dog fox the quick?
[VI:8, November 1982]
bananas and diapers included, as well as travel
expenses based on prevailing United Parcel
Service rates.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Free Lunch
THANKS
to U.S. Representative Robert W.
Daniel, of Virginia, we now have the complete
text of an infamous document that newspapers
around the country treated briefly and facetiously
last summer. It is an evaluation of a remedial math
and writing program in the public schools of
Hopewell, Virginia. The author, whose name
appears nowhere on the document, is a
functionary—how right that ugly word seems just
now—of HEW. The function of this tax-supported
functionary was to judge whether or not the
remedial program merited continued tax support
of its own. Here are some of his (her?) comments.
In each case, what you see is the functionary’s
complete response to a question on the evaluation
form:
The objectives were not to specified are the
measurable participants that involves to the
fullest extent practicable to the total educational
resources
II
Reading
and Writing a la Mode
evidence demonstrated by the standardized
achievement test data was surfaced to the
desegregation elimination, reduction, and
prevention of minority group isolation.
Professional primates
Project proposed!
there is no realistically promises that addresses
the needs identified in the proposes program.
Chimps outshine chumps,
TUG study reveals!
sufficient magnitude in relation to the number of
participants cost of project components,
contains evidence of the proposes project & a
very measurable amount of funds are very
specified in the project program.
On the left: The annual cost of the average HEW
evaluator, not including travel. On the right: The
cost of 25 chimpanzees doing the same work,
Let’s take what comfort we can from this
gibberish. We have learned that there is, in fact, a
tax-supported program in which the amount of
funds actually are very specified and even
“measurable.” It had always seemed otherwise.
Nevertheless, in spite of that cheery news, there’s
still one little cloud, no larger than a consultant’s
outstretched paw, on the educational horizon.
Even as we sit here, innocently enjoying the
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thought that there is, just as we had suspected all
along, no realistically promises, some people are
at work planning to hire more such evaluators in a
cabinet-level Department of Education. If those
education people can achieve stuff like that as a
mere satrapy* of HEW, imagine what they’ll be
able to do when the training wheels come off.
It was not out of wisdom, but weariness, that
our Congress failed in its latest session to visit
upon us a Department of Education. After all,
bureaucrats and educationists† deserve a fullemployment act too, and a DOE will provide
featherbeds for whole new bands of them. They
will, in turn, hire herds of the linguistically
handicapped to evaluate all the remedial programs
for the linguistically handicapped in places like
Hopewell, Virginia. So there is, indeed, no
realistically promises, but there sure as hell is a
free lunch.
Well, we don’t begrudge them comfortable
berths in Washington. At least they’re not on
welfare, and most of them are securely
institutionalized out of the sight of impressionable
children. All we ask of them, when they come into
their kingdom, is that they toss us one tiny crumb,
advancing thereby the cause of pedagogical theory
and even saving us all a few bucks.
Our studies have shown that chimpanzees can
actually grasp Bic Bananas and brandish them
about, both to and fro. Whenever their Bananas
*
The satrap in charge of the evaluator is Thomas K.
Minter, Deputy Commissioner for Elementary and
Secondary Education, HEW Office of Education,
Washington, D. C. 20202. If you happen to be a
functional illiterate looking for work, don’t despair.
Try Minter. It’s not his money.
†
For “professional” educationists, teachers are the
grunts, administrators, the officers. Any variety of
“doctorate” in education, therefore, is a way to get out
of the trenches and become a vice-principal or a
counsellor, an assistant director or a coordinator, a
supervisor or an advisor, anything, anything but a
teacher. More than 60 percent of those who manage to
eke out doctorates in education, typically through
tabulating the answers to an inane questionnaire, do in
fact escape the classroom. [Digest of Education
Statistics: 1977-78, p. 121.] Once bedded down, these
folk cheerfully provide each other with meetings to
attend, reports to generate, guidelines to follow, goals
to implement, instruments to devise, and findings to
seek. A Department of Education makes a splendid
trough for their trotters.
happen to touch flat surfaces, they produce very
interesting marks. Chimps, as you surely know,
have already mastered sign language and abstract
impressionism, both of which would seem beyond
the capacities of a typical HEW evaluator. With a
little training, chimpanzees could surely be taught
to keep their Banana marks on the page, thus
producing documents every bit as useful as the
one quoted above.
The current evaluators wouldn’t have to be
displaced. We could save money simply by not
hiring any new ones and training those we now
have to such a level of competence that they will
actually be able to clean more than just one cage
each.
[II:8, November 1978]
A Minimum Competence to all,
and to all a Good Night!
WE
are now ready to explain the minimum
competence testing mania that stalks the land and
that our educationists have embraced as a
reasonable academic facsimile of disco dancing.
In this life, the frivolous nitwits seem to have all
the fun. Educationists are not frivolous, but they
are entitled to their fun, too.
Here’s how they get it: First, you have to
imagine a herd of people. Let’s call them Herd A.
They are different from each other in many ways,
but, in at least one way, they’re much alike. They
are about equally literate. Here’s how most of
them write English:
Our school’s cross-graded multi-ethnic,
individualized learning program is designed to
enhance the concept of an open-ended learning
program with emphasis on a continuum of
multi-ethnic, academically enriched learning
using the identified intellectually gifted child as
the agent or director of his own learning. Major
emphasis is on cross-graded, multi-ethnic
learning with the main objective being to learn
respect for the uniqueness of a person.
A pitiful case, to be sure, and an urgent
argument for a minimum competence test for
someone, but it’s not that simple. You must also
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imagine another herd of people, Herd B, equally
diverse but also more or less alike in literacy.
Here’s how they write English:
The time capsule of the 20th century floating
threw space finely reaches it’s goal one hundred
years later. As it is open up information of the
past one hundred years is released.
The automobile one of man’s greatest
achievements for transportation. Now it can not
be used because man has wasted all of the
nature oil of the earth. It is studied and the result
is that man could have develope a less wasteful
type of transportation. But the need for power
and speed overwhemled there thoughts.
That does have a poignant quality. Finely,
indeed, is just how we might have reached our
goals, if only our thoughts hadn’t been
overwhemled. Nevertheless, the passage has some
faults. The writers of Herd B also seem less than
minimally competent.
Little by little it became obvious even to the
dimmest of curriculum coordinators and program
supervisors that the public’s alarm about
minimum competence could be turned into more
jobs for their ilk and bigger staffs for just about
every department in the educationist bureaucracy.
It is an axiom of those jaunty functionaries that
there are no problems, only challenges and
opportunities, and this was one of the richest
opportunities since the invention of guidance
counsellors.
So the thing was done. Because members of
Herd A are often bigger, it seemed only right that
they should test the members of Herd B, rather
than vice versa. (The testing of Herd A will
probably have to wait until the Day of Judgment.)
The testing goes like this: That apparatchik who
wrote the first passage will eventually assure us
that the schools are doing a great job. He’ll point
to the scores. The scores will prove that many
members of Herd B now do understand the colon
and can often make decisions about lay and lie.
So there. Let nothing you dismay.
SPEAKING of lay and lie, here’s a strange item
you might have missed, buried, as it was, in the
letters column of the Star-Herald of Trenton. That
paper had printed a guest column by one
“Publius,” said to be a member of the educational
apparatus. Publius commented on the quality of
the written English in a summary report cranked
out by the people who cooked up the minimum
competency testing program for New Jersey. He
did not provide quotations, but he did describe
some sad mistakes of just the kind we have
learned to expect in such documents.
Thereafter, the New Jersey Commissioner of
Education, one Burke, set forth his understanding
of the matter in a letter to the editor. Like any
standard educationist, he suggested that a concern
for stuff like punctuation and the agreement of
subjects and verbs was “pedantic” and
“picayune.” So much for education in New Jersey.
Having thus implied that there is nothing much
wrong with the summary, Burke, like any
standard bureaucrat, hastens to put as much
distance as he can between himself and the
perpetrators of the almost flawless document.
Nobody in his department, he says, had anything
to do with it. That seems true.
He goes further, however, saying that the
summary was done by “laymen” and that the
deliberating committees were made up of the
same. That is false.
When that crew was first collected, there were
complaints that ordinary citizens were but poorly
represented. The imbalance was duly corrected,
bringing the membership to 108, of which only 83
were “professionals” of education. That still failed
to satisfy someone, apparently, for 13 more
“professionals” were added a bit later. The final
score was: “Professionals,” 96; Laymen, 25
(including 5 members of school boards).
At Burke’s office, they say that well, maybe
“laymen” wasn’t the best word. What he meant
was that no one in his outfit had done the deed.
(That, of course, Burke had already said.) In
Trenton, “professionals” of education who belong
to other gangs can be called “laymen.” It may be a
kind of “cover.” Our concern about such
misrepresentation will be thought, of course,
picayune and pedantic.
Is the commissioner capable of saying what he
means? If so, why does he choose to mislead us?
If not, shouldn’t we be considering a minimum
competence test for commissioners? We can clear
him of the suspicion of duplicity only through
granting his ignorance, and vice versa, but it must
be the one or the other. Take your choice.
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It is interesting that the “mistaken” use of
“laymen” causes a misunderstanding so
convenient for educationists. As they’ve tried to
blame falling scores on test-makers and rising
illiteracy on “problem youngsters,” so they would
dearly love to conclude that failures of agreement
are caused by those laymen.
We have noted before that public dismay about
education has been converted into job security for
the very people whose failures caused that
dismay. Well, that’s progress. In ancient times, we
used to pay the barbarians to stay away.
[II:9, December 1978]
Three Mile Island Syndrome
IF you were lucky enough to have been a reader
of this journal in March of 1978, you may now
remember where you heard it first. In that issue,
we (more or less) accurately predicted not only
the recent mishap at Three Mile Island but also
the collision of a southbound Metroliner (a crack
train, that) with a hastily abandoned repair vehicle
of some sort. “We are,” we told you, “in the hands
of people who say they know what they’re doing,
but they don’t.” We called them “self-styled
experts failing in the work they said they could do
and excusing themselves because the work is
difficult.” Those are precisely the people who
smash us into tampers and bring us to the brink of
“super-prompt critical power excursion,” as the
old AEC once called “meltdown.” It sure is good
to know, isn’t it, that there couldn’t possibly be
any such ninnies scratching their heads and
tapping the dials down in the bunkers and silos of
the North American Air Defense Command.
Curiously enough, in the same piece we cited
Adam Smith’s observation that when people of
the same calling consort together, the result is
always a conspiracy against the public. That, in
the context of recent calamities, must bring at
once to every mind dark suspicions about the
National Council of Teachers of English. In every
control room and laboratory in America, in the
cockpits of aeroplanes and the swivel-chairs of
agencies, wherever meters are read and decisions
made and dials twiddled, this sinister confraternity
has planted unwitting agents. Dr. Fu Manchu
never had it so good.
It wasn’t even hard. All they had to do was
convince us that painstaking accuracy in small
details was nyet humanistic and not worth fussing
about in the teaching of reading and writing. They
seized and promulgated, for instance, the bizarre
notion that guessing at unknown words was more
creative than learning the sounds of letters, thus
providing us with whole bureaucracies full of
nitwits whose writing, at best, is made out of more
or less approximate words that might sort of mean
something or other. After all, if your teacher
applauds your creativity when you read “supper”
for “dinner,” you’re little likely to grow up caring
about the difference between parameter and
perimeter.
The NCTE worries about the “trivializing” of
competence tests by persnickety questions on
punctuation and spelling, preferring that student
writing skills be judged “holistically” and with no
“emphasis on trivia.” (College English, March
1979, pp. 827-828.) By that, they mean that
student writing should be judged subjectively by
members of the teacher club (who else could
provide a “holistic rating”?), and that skills like
spelling and punctuation, objectively measurable
by mere civilians, are to be held of little or no
account.
One NCTEer, a certain Seymour Yesner, a
public school teacher in Minneapolis, questions
whether spelling or capitalization “is as important
as presenting ideas in logical sequence.” Sure.
There must be millions of kids who haven’t been
taught too much about the relatively undemanding
skills of spelling and punctuation but have
nevertheless mastered the rigorous discipline of
“presenting ideas in logical sequence.”
Another, James Hoetker of Florida State
University, laments a competence test “that makes
no mention at all of student creative work . . . or
appreciation.” You can’t get away with pretending
to teach spelling and punctuation; the facts will
find you out. Creativity and appreciation, however
...
The most pathetic whimper, and probably the
most revealing, comes from one Thomas Gage of
Humboldt State University in California. He
bemoans “thirty-five performance indicators
which are clearly utilitarian” and because of
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which he fears that “little humanistic education
can be provided.” That’s the heart of the matter.
Whether or not NCTEers can teach things like
spelling and punctuation, who knows? In any
case, they obviously don’t want to. They want to
wear the robes of prophets and priests and peddle
to their students the same bogus “humanistic”
attitudes that were peddled to them in the teacher
academy. They want to preside over rap sessions
on values clarification and play charades of
holistic creativity and appreciation enhancement.
Children always learn something in school, but
what they learn is seldom what we had in mind to
teach. Children who grow up under the influence
of the humanistic education mongers, what do
they learn? They learn that hosts of errors will be
forgiven for even the pretense of good intentions.
They learn that shabby workmanship brings no
penalty, especially in the context of anything silly
or self-indulgent enough to be put forth as
“creative.” They learn that the mastery of skills is
of little importance, for even the supposed
teachers of skills have found comfortable jobs in
spite of their indifference to those skills and, not
infrequently, in spite of an obvious lack of those
skills. They learn to be shoddy workers in any
endeavor, comforting themselves, as their teachers
did, by fantasies of a holistic excellence unfettered
by precision in small details, or “emphasis on
trivia.”
Then they take jobs with power companies and
railroads, where machines and toxic substances,
unmindful of “holistic ratings,” take heed only—
and always, always—of the little things, the
valves and switches, the trivia.
[III:5, May 1979]
The Turkeys Crow in Texas
TIME magazine reports that schoolchildren in
the USSR, by the end of tenth grade, have been
ruthlessly deprived of their right to a language of
their own and subjected to ten years of learning
grammatical rules and as many as seven years of
some foreign language. And there’s worse. Those
godless communist tykes have had their
creativities and self-esteems destroyed by
geometry, algebra, and even calculus, for God’s
sakes! And not one lousy mini-course in baseball
fiction or the poetry of rock and roll! You talk
about elitism? Now there’s your elitism. Those
commies want to make just about everybody into
some kind of elitist. Why just about the only thing
an American kid would recognize in a Russian
school is the values clarification and social
adjustment stuff. Probably swiped it from us in
the first place anyway.
Still, let’s hope we don’t have to fight with
those Russians, an anti-humanistic crew all hung
up on mere skills. In fact, if we have to fight, let’s
see if we can’t arrange to fight with the Texans.
Down in Texas, the school folk are mighty
proud of the results of their new state-wide
competence tests. You might not believe this, but
it turns out that ninety-six percent of the ninth
graders in Texas can correctly add and subtract
whole numbers three times in four! (Stick that in
your samovar, comrade!) And that, friends, means
that the teenager in the diner on Route 66 will
give you the correct change ninety-six percent of
seventy-five percent of the time, or seventy-two
times out of every hundred chili dogs. And in
Russia you can’t even get a chili dog.
And if you’re worried about writing, forget it.
Fifty-four percent of the Lone Star State ninth
graders have “mastered” writing. And that beats
hell out of the whole New Yorker crowd, of whom
more than ninety-nine percent still have to worry
about stuff like whether or not “ambient” is really
the best word.
At the end you will find the topic assigned for
the writing competence test and the essays of two
ninth graders, one of whom has mastered writing.
See if you can figure out which—and why.
Keep in mind, as you cogitate, that it was not
the schoolteachers of Texas who scored the
essays. The scoring was to have been done by the
Educational Testing Service, but the canny
Texans decided that they wanted no part of
holisticism. So they gave the scoring contract to
Westinghouse, naturally, and the Westinghousers,
naturally, hired some two hundred residents of
Iowa City and a certain Paul Diehl, who is a
porseffor of Eglinsh. (See The Porseffers of
Eglinsh.) at Iowa University. These combined
forces, some aiding, some abetting, gallantly
resisted the indecent allure of holistic scoring and
devised instead an austere discipline, “focused
primary trait holistic scoring.” Naturally.
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It is the special virtue of focused primary trait
holistic scoring that it rewards exactly that kind of
competence that we have chosen as the goal of
our highest national aspirations—the minimum
kind. It takes upon itself, in the best Christian
tradition, the work that God seems to be shirking.
Focused primary trait holistic scoring exalteth
them of low degree, and, by ferreting out and
punishing pretensions to elitism, putteth down the
mighty from their seats. That’s the American way,
and if the Russians would just go and do likewise,
we wouldn’t have to worry about them anymore.
And thus it comes to pass that, on a scale from 0
to 4, Essay B gets a 2, witness to mastery, and by
far the most common score. Essay A, however, is
not up to the standards of focused primary trait
holistic scoring. It gets a 1.
How so? Simple. Writer B gave two reasons for
his choice. That is mastery in the “organization of
ideas.” What is more, his prose style suggests that
professors of education and superintendents of
schools won’t feel too déclassé in his company.
Writer A gave only one reason for his choice.
However, even had he given fifty reasons, he
would not have earned a better score. Focused
primary trait holistic scoring is not intended for
the encouragement of wiseacres like that snotty A
kid, and it provides that no score better than a 1
can be awarded to any writer who “challenges the
question.” You have to nip that funny stuff right
in the old bud. You let that once get started and
the next thing you know some of those brats will
clarify some of our values and that will be the end
of life adjustment as we know it.
Well, maybe if we make focused primary trait
holistic scoring a state secret, some Russian spy
will steal it. It’s our only hope.
The Topic
Suppose that your school is short of money
and can keep only one of the following:
driver education, school athletics, art, music,
or vocational programs. You and other
students have been asked to write to the
principal and tell which one program you
most want to keep. Be sure to give the
reasons for the one you choose. Remember,
you can choose only one program.
ESSAY A
“You have proposed an illogical situation, but I
will do my best to give you an answer. I choose
driver’s education over the other classes on my
own special process of elimination. School
athletics is out because I can’t stand the class and
have no wish to inflict it on others. Art and music
are really unfair electives to leave out, but they are
certainly not as important as driving unless you
plan to make a career of them. In that case, I’m
sorry but life is hard. Vocational programs were
the toughest of all to leave out (and it is the
subject your mythical school will probably keep,
despite this recommendation), because you do
make a career of them, but look at it this way:
Driving is almost essential to a person’s life, and
although one could learn to drive elsewhere, it
would be much more expensive. Actually, my
whole rationale doesn’t have to make sense
because your question didn’t in the first place.”
ESSAY B
“I think you should keep Athletics. Because its
good for the Body. And it can Help you if you
would like to Become a pro football player.”
[IV:6, September 1980]
This story is told in gritty detail in Texas Monthly,
June, 1980. If you still fancy that competence tests
are part of the solution rather than part of the
problem, you’d better ask TM for a reprint of
“What’s the Score?” They’re at 1600 Austin
National Bank Tower, Austin 78701. While
you’re at it, ask for Gene Lyons’ horrifying piece
(Sept. 1970) on the unspeakable practices of
teacher-training academics.
________________________________________
Page 14
New Highs, New Lows
Big Bucks for Bantam Books in Booboisie
Slow readers could lead to fast sales, book
publishers believe. Bantam Books Inc.
launches a series of “high/low” paperbacks,
designed to hold high interest for teen-agers
with low reading skills. Scholastic Inc.
expanded to more than 100 titles a series of
paperbacks for teen-agers reading as low as
the second-grade level.
SHARETEXT™ The Leaning Tower of Babel
The books usually offer simple plots, short
sentences and many pictures. Most treat
subjects that captivate teen-agers such as
disco music and love. Bantam’s titles
include “Disco Kid” (“Al1 set to boogie and
no place to go”) and “Rock Fever” (“The
rest of his life was a mess, but Doug was
alive when he sang”).
Rising attention to the low reading levels
of many students helps prompt schools and
libraries to buy these books, says Thetis
Powers Reeves, publisher of High/Low
Report, a newsletter.
simple a thing as a sequence of complete
sentences. It’s a passage from Brainstorm (“Never
give a sucker an even break”), by Walter Dean
Myers, also the author of It Ain’t All for Nothing:
They had not expected the summer storm. In
2076 the science of weather was very exact. The
storm had not lasted very long. There was some
thunder. A few flashes of lightning. And it was
over. Then the strange reports started. People
found lying in the streets. They weren’t dead.
But they had no idea who they were. In the
worst cases they couldn’t speak.
They were taken to hospitals. They were
tested carefully. All proved to be healthy.
Healthy but helpless. When they were hungry,
they would cry. When they had been fed they
would lie still. Sometimes they would make soft
noises. Finally they were sent to Brain Study
unit for more tests. Then came the discovery.
Their minds were gone!
[from The Wall Street Journal, March 20, 1981]
SURE, there’s one born every minute, but what
good is that? That’s a lousy 525,600 new suckers
a year. Well, shoot, when you consider our infant
mortality rates and the obvious fact that a hefty
percentage of those kids might escape suckerdom
entirely just purely out of dumb luck by being
born into the wrong kind of family, the day may
come when there won’t be enough suckers in
America to buy all those lottery tickets or support
the manufacturers of pornographic T-shirts and
keep CHIPs and The Dukes of Hazzard at the top
of the charts.
So let’s hear it for those swell folks at Bantam
Books, and a big hand, please, for those schools
and libraries, bravely bearing through the gloom
of back-to-basicsism the glowing lamp of
minimum competence and maximum bottom line.
And kudos and laurels, too, for Charles F.
Reasoner, professor of elementary education at
New York University. Reasoner (what a splendid
name) is editor and the leading intellectual light at
Laurel Leaf Library, Dell’s arsenal of high/low
books with lots of pictures. As long as America
has educators like Reasoner meeting the needs of
corporate enterprise, there will never be any
shortage of housewives who need to be told that
their kitchen cleaner will also clean the bathroom,
and no one will ever even wonder why shiny
flakes mean true coffee taste or if deodorants are
really necessary, and Gilligan’s Island will go on
forever.
Here’s an example of Reasoner’s astute editorial
judgment, always on guard against anti-social
incitements to critical thinking, the nasty
skepticism that can actually be caused by so
There. That should keep the little buggers
healthy but helpless. Give’m a few pages of that
every day, and in no time at all they’ll be lying
still, making soft noises.
[V:5, May 1981]
The Same Old Witchcraft
District Literacy Definition
(From somewhere either in or near Minneapolis.)
Page 15
The literate person is one who has acquired
the skills of reading, writing, mathematics,
speaking, listening, problem solving,
acquiring and using information, and
judgment making. Further, the literate
person is one who has developed a feeling of
self worth and importance; respect for and
appreciation and understanding of other
people and cultures; and a desire for
learning. The literate person is one who
continues to seek knowledge, to increase
personal skills and the quality of
relationships with others, and to fulfill
individual potential.
SHARETEXT™ The Leaning Tower of Babel
THE TRUTH, at last, can be told. That Aristotle
fellow was, in fact, not a literate man. He never
developed positive feelings about barbarians.
Indeed, the more he came to learn about them, the
less he appreciated them.
Franz Kafka wasn’t literate either, you know.
Like so many other illiterate “writers”—who can
count them?—he was never able to develop any
positive feelings of self-worth and importance.
Hemingway was always shooting off his mouth
and never became a good listener. Eliot made
some positively anti-democratic judgments, and
Mark Twain made some really dumb ones. Even
Norman Mailer is said to be utterly illiterate in the
quality of his relationships with others.
But don’t worry about it. Our schools are doing
everything they can to assure that we will be less
and less troubled by such pseudo-literates.
The true literates are in the sphere—or is it the
arena?—of education. In that sphere, or field, it is
almost impossible to find anyone who hasn’t
developed impregnable feelings of self-worth and
importance. So unreservedly do they respect and
appreciate other cultures that they never fall into
the error of finding anything respectable or
appreciatable in their own. The quality of their
relationships with others is amazing; they never,
never disagree or contend, and they always hail
enthusiastically each other’s bold innovative
thrusts and experiential programs of excellence.
And what could be stronger testimony to their
fulfillment of individual potential than the fact
that they have somehow persuaded the rest of us
to pay them for all the stuff they do?
Now all of that, as you can discover from the
handy District Literacy Definition shown above,
is the real heart and guts of true literacy, pure and
undefiled. What little it seems not to include—
reading and writing and the acquisition of mere
information, for example—will simply have to be
re-understood in the context of the more important
aspects, which may also be perceived as being
facets, or else parameters, of district literacy.
Reading and writing are, of course, quite useful.
How else, after all, will our children grow up to
understand the labels on medicine bottles and
write letters of application for jobs and increase
personal skills in the solution of Rubik’s Cube?
Indeed, the promised day of universal mass
education through non-print electro-multi-media
and relationship-quality encounter sessions may
not come as quickly as many of us would like.
And even then it will probably be useful if the
masses can figure out the wall posters. So we will
have to teach some reading and writing into the
foreseeable future. However, reading and writing
can be overdone, as the examples above must
prove. People can sometimes, even in schools,
become addicted to reading and writing, using
them as crutches. Reading addicts especially often
become—well, we had better say it right out—
they become critical. You show us a student who
would rather read some book than fulfill
individual potential through creative interaction
with representatives of other cultures and age
groups, and we will show you someone who will
always have difficulty with increasing the quality
of relationships with others.
You laymen would better appreciate the true
meaning of literacy if you could only see
hyperkinetic reading behavior for what it really
is—yet another of the countless hitherto
unidentified learning disabilities. This should be
perfectly clear to anyone who takes the trouble to
consider what effects hyperkinetic reading
behavior must have on true literacy as defined
above:
v Because he is often exposed, and without
appropriate professional guidance, to diverse and
conflicting opinions, and the all-too-often
cunningly persuasive rhetoric of people who
really have nothing more to express than some
ideas of their own, the hyperkinetic reader often
lags behind his classmates in Judgment Making.
He is all too apt to say, either to himself, thus
exacerbating his disability, or aloud, thus
disrupting a whole class and spoiling a perfectly
good lesson plan: “Well, maybe, but on the other
hand” And just think what that can do to the
quality of relationships with others!
v The hyperkinetic reader not infrequently
abuses the Acquiring and Using of Information in
unprogrammed acquisition (and inevitable
misuse) of information not conducive to the
Respect and Appreciation of Other People and
Cultures but only to the Understanding of the
same. That will just not do.
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v Hyperkinetic readers almost invariably read
works that do not appear on the school district’s
list of suggested readings, so that they often find
themselves perplexed and troubled by materials
written at much too high a grade level. Reading,
after all, is supposed to be loads of fun. When it
becomes a struggle, and especially when it causes
negative feelings of doubt and questioning, the
hapless reader may fail to develop that Feeling of
Self Worth and Importance appropriate to literacy.
v And these people who always have their noses
stuck in books usually won’t even Listen!
Among the great successes of our schools is the
fact that they have always been able to prevent
serious and widespread outbreaks of hyperkinetic
reading behavior syndrome. This is a remarkable
feat, since most young children, even when they
first come to school, already exhibit morbid
curiosity behavior and persistent questioning
behavior, dangerous precursors that must be
replaced quickly with group interaction skills and
self-awareness enhancement. (Children who are
properly preoccupied with themselves and with
some presumed distinctions between individual
whims and collective whims hardly ever fall into
hyperkinetic reading behavior syndrome.)
Although a few intractable cases can still be
found, we realistically expect, and before long, to
eradicate this crippling disability and usher in the
age of true literacy.
Our only problem, as usual, is with the public,
where
outdated
and
narrow-minded
misconceptions about true literacy can still be
found. We must educate the public. Again. It’s
time for every literacy district to promulgate a
District Literacy Definition. That’ll teach ‘em.
[VI:2, February 1082]
The Teacher of the Year
Daniel Stephenson, of Salt Lake City
As little foundation is there for the report
that I am a teacher, and take money; this
accusation has no more truth in it than the
other. Although, if a man were really able to
instruct mankind, to receive money for
giving instruction would, in my opinion, be
an honor to him.
A TRUE TEACHER is even harder to describe than
to find. We have all known a handful of true
teachers, and we can usually see that their
differences were probably greater than their
similarities.
What was it, then, that made them true? Is there
one common trait? Are there several? Are there
any? Can they be acquired?
If we knew the answers, we would print them
right here and put an end to the spastic silliness of
the teacher academies, but we suspect that nobody
knows those answers, that the questions are just
too human to permit final answers. The true
teacher is a bit like an actor or a musician, a queer
duck, with indubitable but finally inexplicable
powers, powers that no amount of training will
provide where something or other that we don’t
understand is absent.
Nevertheless, we do know a true teacher when
we see one, and we see one in Daniel Stephenson
of Salt Lake City. We heard of him because of a
fascinating AP story and a few phone calls to
Utah:
There is, in Utah, a certain Daryl McCarty.
McCarty was a functionary of some sort in the
state office of a teachers’ union. Then, somehow
or other, he suddenly became Associate State
Superintendent of Schools for Instruction. While
being interviewed by a reporter from the Salt Lake
Tribune, the newly capitalized ASSS for
Instruction somehow found reason to mention the
fact that he hadn’t read more than two or three
books all the way through.
We, of course, would have taken something like
that for granted, and given it only the briefest
mention. Daniel Stephenson, however, is not
cynical. In fact, until he came to hear of Daryl
McCarty, Educator, he “thought everybody in the
whole universe liked to read.”
Children, unlike grown-ups, who usually
discover in others their own worst faults, usually
presume in others their own best virtues. Daniel
Stephenson is six years old, and from his point of
view, all that unfortunate man needed was a little
friendly help. In a letter to the editor, and with a
little friendly help from his father, who gave some
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tips on spelling, the young teacher did his best to
bring light into the darkness.
“Make a paper chain,” he suggested, little
suspecting that it is indeed out of prodigious
chains of Paper that all McCarty’s are made. “Add
a new loop for every book you read,” wrote
Daniel, who believes that those who operate the
schools actually have the values and attitudes that
they urge on him, and that they announce to the
world as witness to the honor of their labors and
as claim to money.
“Since you are older,” said Daniel, “your mom
and dad won’t mind. I bet your wife won’t mind.”
And if she did mind, he added, McCarty could
always “get a flashlight and read under the
covers.”
When asked what he had learned from all that,
McCarty replied, with exemplary exactitude: “I
haven’t given it much thought.”
“Just because one does not sit down and read
Little Red Riding Hood, or novel after novel,
doesn’t mean they aren’t educated or can’t do
their job,” says this Associate State
Superintendent for Instruction in Utah. “Basically,
I don’t do an awful lot of reading, it’s just not my
forte,” says this educator. “I don’t have a lot of
remorse over it.” And as to his teacher’s best
advice, he solemnly explains: “I don’t like the
idea of taking my flashlight to bed and reading
under the covers. It might be suspect for an adult
to do that.”
Now there’s an intriguing idea. Of what,
exactly, would he be “suspect” if he did read by
flashlight under the covers? Intellectual appetite,
or some other horrid perversion? Which shall we
prize the more: the Associate Superintendent for
Instruction who is addicted to reading under the
covers, or the one who can do “their job” just as
he is, thank you, who smugly tells us that he has
“made it a long way without books,” and who
isn’t about to take any advice from one of the
children given into his charge?
Daniel Stephenson ended his letter with this:
“Since you are a leader of schools, you should try
to set the example. You should try to like reading.
If you keep trying, you can’t help but like it.”
A leader of schools.
And that, of course is exactly what McCarty
is—a leader of schools and schooling, a
functionary of a government agency whose
purpose is to do something in the minds of
children, through what the Leaders choose to call
Instruction, for which they have an Associate
Leader, a specialist, no doubt, carefully selected
by the other functionaries for the sake of whatever
it may be that is his “forte,” and that has brought
him such a long way.
What can it be, that mysterious forte, which can
bring us an Educator of the People as readily as a
Ruler of the Queen’s Nigh-vee? Can that fine
forte be taught? Can McCarty, now that he’s in
charge, work things out so that Daniel Stephenson
can learn it? Can Daniel ever hope to become an
Educator of the People by idling away his life
with Little Red Riding Hood and novel after
novel? Will he go a long way, or will he stay
always at the bottom of schooling’s massy heap,
never an Educator, just a true teacher to his
children, never a Leader of anything, just a small
lamp of thoughtfulness for those who know him,
something just a little “suspect” perhaps,
something like a flashlight under the covers?
[VII:1, February 1983]
III
On Language
and the Power of Thought
Instruments of Precision
Their two is not the real two,
their four is not the real four.
Prof Prods Pol!
Emerson Elucidated!
WE HAVE long hoped to find a good, concrete
example, with numbers, of what Emerson must
have had in mind when he said, speaking of those
whose minds have been replaced by the orthodox
slogans of some faction, that even their numbers
are not the real thing. It is a puzzling statement,
for Emerson could hardly have meant that they
were so bad at computation that they always came
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up with wrong numbers. He could only have
meant that even when they said something that the
rest of us would take to have a specific meaning,
they did not exactly say that.
We can find plenty of that, of course, not only
in Academe, but even out there in The World,
which may be no better a place after all. The big
Twos and Fours, which we hear as “The People’s
Democratic Republic of Whatever,” or “Quality
Education,” always turn out to mean not what we
might have thought. Our obtuseness may require a
dose of Reeducation, or, as some apologist for life
adjustment remediation enhancement schooling
will name it sooner or later, “People’s Democratic
Quality Reeducation.” Arbeit macht frei.
But such examples seemed not quite right. We
wanted numbers. Now, thanks to three alert
readers, all on the mailing list for a newsletter sent
out by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, we have them.
Some professor (of what, you guess) wrote
Moynihan, who happens to be a professional
politician, some helpful hints for the art of gogy,
either peda- or dema-. Here are the excerpts
quoted in the newsletter:
[Your] material had a readability level of 10.811.2. This means that it would be considered
readable to people who had at least a tenth grade
reading level. In order to broaden the “target
audience” of your newsletter and to make your
message more accessible to more voters, I might
suggest that such material be written at a lower
level of readability.
Moynihan must be an extraordinarily patient
man. Or maybe he’s just so busy trying to rustle
up “increased funding for quality education” that
he can hardly take time off to study the work of
the mind as done by the quality educationists who
will get to spend the increased funding. Here is
Moynihan’s reply:
This is how technique traps us. The intended
meaning is that I should write at an eighth grade
level, or something such. But the professor has
said I should lower the readability level of what
I write. Surely that means to make it less
readable! It seems to me the professor was not
clear.
Why Moynihan calls that stuff an example that
shows how we are trapped by technique is hard to
fathom. Can he believe that “the professor” is just
too good at something, in command of too much
technique, or a master of a skill too technical to
assure mere accuracy? If so, it would not be
surprising. It has long been an article of our
folklore that too much knowledge or skill, or
especially consummate expertise, is a bad thing. It
dehumanizes those who achieve it, and makes
difficult their commerce with just plain folks, in
whom good old common sense has not been
obliterated by mere book-learning or fancy
notions. This popular delusion flourishes now
more than ever, for we are all infected with it in
the schools, where educationists have elevated it
from folklore to Article of Belief. It enhances
their self-esteem and lightens their labors by
providing theoretical justification for deciding that
appreciation, or even simple awareness, is more to
be prized than knowledge, and relating (to self
and others), more than skill, in which minimum
competence will be quite enough.
It is possible, of course, that Moynihan shares
the delusion, and for all the same reasons. The
chosen goals (and probably the inner needs) of
politicians are not in any important way different
from those of the educationist. But if this
politician really thinks that that educationist just
got “trapped” by his devotion to the stern
demands of “technique,” then the republic stands
in greater peril than we thought. Let’s hope that
Moynihan was just trying to be polite.
We are not polite. We can say that “the
professor” is a boob and a charlatan, and a mealymouth too, with his hokey “material,” and his justbetween-us-realists-no-offense-intended quotation
marks on “target audience,” and that pussyfooting “I might suggest” when he is in the act of
suggesting. That sort of thing is usually just an
involuntary
verbal
twitch,
pitiable
but
disconcerting. (Technique does not trap us;
ignorance of technique traps us.) But that cliquish
use of the word “material” is—well—material.
Educationists just don’t feel right, and feeling is
accounted a way of knowing in their world, about
books. A book is the work of a mind, doing its
work in the way that a mind deems best. That’s
dangerous. Is the work of some mere individual
mind likely to serve the alms of collectively
accepted compromises, which are known in the
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schools as “standards”? Any mind that would
audaciously put itself forth to work all alone is
surely a bad example for the students, and
probably, if not downright anti-social, at least a
little off-center, self-indulgent, elitist. Such a
mind might easily bore somebody, since only a
very few people can possibly feel an interest in
highly specialized subjects. And then there’s the
problem of self-esteem, a frail flower, easily
bruised by the unfamiliar, by arcane references,
snooty allusions, and, especially, by prose that is
simply not written at the right grade level. It’s just
good pedagogy, therefore, to stay away from such
stuff, and use instead, if film-strips and rap
sessions must be supplemented, “texts,” selected,
or prepared, or adapted, by real professionals.
Those texts are called “reading material.” They
are the academic equivalent of the “listening
material” that fills waiting-rooms, and the “eating
material” that you can buy in thousands of
convenient eating resource centers along the
roads.
Those marvelous numbers that “the professor”
has derived do, in fact, measure something, but
not what they pretend to measure. A score of 10.8
means: If this stuff were being considered for a
place on our list of approved reading material, we
would have to point out that it is only after almost
eleven years of our professional tutelage that the
average student will be able to achieve scores that
indicate basic minimum competence in filling in
blanks and checking the appropriate squares on a
standardized reading material comprehension
assessment instrument, which is “standardized”
because we design it to go with the stuff that we
use as reading material suitable for students who
have had almost eleven years of our tutelage.
If you sniff a whiff of madness in such notions
of “measurement,” you must have been reading
not simply with comprehension but with
understanding. Something important depends on
making some clear distinction between the two.
Educationists seem to have made, in their
practice, a distinction like this: Comprehension is
what is shown by the ability to make or recognize
more or less accurate rephrasings of what you
have just read; Understanding is an inner feeling
by virtue of which we can correctly “relate to”
people and ideas. Some such distinction must
inform their belief that knowledge just isn’t
enough, and may not even be needed at all, for the
accomplishment of the higher goals of education,
which lie in the realm of attitudes and feelings.
We won’t quarrel with that definition of
comprehension. We will quarrel instead with the
educationists’ apparent notion that comprehension
is the point of reading. It is not. Only in some very
special cases is comprehension the point of
reading—in things like recipes and “reading
material.” The point of reading is understanding,
and comprehension is to understanding as getting
wet is to swimming. You must do the one before
you can hope to do the other, but you don’t do the
other simply because you do the one.
Comprehension permits us to answer the
question: What does it say? Understanding
permits us to begin answering an endless series of
questions starting with: What can we say about it?
The difference can be demonstrated by
Emerson’s sentence, with which this all began:
“Their two is not the real two, their four is not the
real four.” What score “the professor” would give
it, we don’t know. But we do know that those
“professors” presume that the syllable is the
quantum of comprehension, and that short words
are by nature easier to comprehend than long
words—“sloth,” for instance, easier than
“laziness.” The same applies to sentences; the
shorter, the easier. Emerson’s sentence is made of
fourteen words and probably is a bit long for
reading material, but it is made of two almost
identical sentences joined by a comma, and uses
only seven different words, each of them a
common monosyllable. So its “readability” score
ought to be very low. Somewhere in the middle of
first grade, any child ought to be able to
“comprehend” it. And then?
The professor’s reading is not the real reading.
His readability—and this misled Moynihan to the
right conclusion—is not the real readability. It is
an essential attribute of “reading material” that it
be appropriately comprehendable at a certain
grade level, which makes it, at any grade level,
agonizingly unreadable. That could account for a
few other things.
[VI:6, September 1982]
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All-Purpose Gobbledygook
Naming of Parts
HERE’S some swell news from the Newsletter
LIKE the counterjumper who drinks from his
of the Minnesota Higher Education Coordinating
Commission:
“Minnesota post-secondary education is at the
threshold of what may become the most dramatic
transition ever experienced in the state’s
educational enterprise, according to the Higher
Education Coordinating Commission. Several
partially interrelated circumstances and forces are
converging in such a manner as to cause a
potentially profound impact on the shape of
education beyond high school, according to
Making the Transition, the Commission’s biennial
report. Minnesota post-secondary education also
is faced with considerable uncertainty, says the
report. . . . Some of the uncertainty stems from
conflicting and changing societal forces that
impinge on education, and some emanates from
lack of agreement on what constitutes desirable
and undesirable modifications and directions for
post-secondary education.”
So, did you note the remarkable subtleties of its
elegant metaphoric texture? It’s not the threshold
of a transition; it’s the threshold of what may
become a transition. Circumstances and forces,
partially
interrelated
(therefore
partially
uninterrelated) converge, but not in just any old
way. They converge in such a manner as to cause
an impact, maybe not a profound one, but
potentially profound, and an impact that we might
well have missed had the circumstances and
forces converged in another way. And that
uncertainty! Some of it stems from forces; some
of it emanates from lack. And . . . enough. The
mind reels.
But here’s the beauty part. If you memorize that
passage, leaving out all reference to schools in
Minnesota, you’ll find that you can speak with
confident authority on any subject just by filling
in the blanks! Try it. See?
Holy Cow! Maybe they are educators after all.
You’ll never get experiential skills enhancement
like that from reading Emerson!
fingerbowl while trying to pass himself off as a
peer, the academic arriviste betrays himself by
mouthing words he doesn’t understand. His
sequenced modules and problematical parameters
are Academe’s versions of bronzed baby shoes
and lawn ornaments in the shape of flamingos.
The Snopeses of Academe (who won’t even
know where to look that up) have problems not
only with hard words like holistic, which they
occasionally spell “wholistic,” but even with
simple words like phase and factor. They seem
baffled by words that name the various possible
kinds of parts.
Their students catch their ignorance. A few
months ago, we quoted a “communications”
major, a young lady who wanted to experience the
segments of the field in order to pinpoint a facet to
pursue. She was probably following some ga-ga
creative writing teacher’s rule for colorful and
varied diction, but she will suffer permanent brain
damage if she actually thinks that segment and
facet are synonyms, or that either makes sense in
naming the parts of a field. Of course, she
probably wasn’t thinking any such thing; she just
wasn’t thinking.
And that explains why our educationists and
their victims have so much trouble with the
naming of parts. You have to do a little thinking—
not much, but obviously too much for some
people—to understand the difference between a
segment and a facet, and a little more to
understand why the mind is not clarified by
considering either the segments or the facets of a
field.
Such thoughtlessness is aggravated by the
cloudiness of field, which readers of pedaguese
will recognize as a handy plug-in replacement for
area, sphere, and domain. Educationists can
babble forever about the phases of their fields and
the facets of their spheres. There is no need for
precise definition where there are no real things to
be defined.
There are no boundaries to the happy land of
Let’s Pretend. If you can imagine that you are
thinking as you contemplate the facets of your
cute little sphere, you are only one baby step away
from sucking on their aspects and their
[III:9, December 1979]
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parameters. Aspects and parameters are two of the
darlingest baubles of the mindless, who find them
especially useful in the naming of parts. Segments
and phases are in fact certain kinds of parts. If
you talk about facets of a segment of your area,
some rude elitist—from off the education field,
naturally—may call your bluff, requiring that you
describe exactly the nature of the parts and of their
relationships both to each other and to the whole.
You can avoid such embarrassment by hiding in
the aspects and parameters, which aren’t parts of
any kind. If you prate about the problematical
parameters of the affective aspects of your area,
your playmates will give you a D.Ed., and the
rude elitists, realizing that you are beyond the
reach of reason, will trouble you no more. But,
hoping still, they will tiptoe away, leaving you to
amuse yourself in your playpen with your favorite
words; luckily, they’re all sharp instruments.
Thus, in conclusion, let it be said plainly, that in
the perception of this observer, for what the
thought of any one individual may be worth, our
conceptual foundations have deteriorated to the
point that action is now occurring in a virtual
void of theory. Theory, it can be reasonably
noted, is the intelligence of practical action. And
science—i.e., that ordered array of the firmest
understanding available in any given era or
short term period, inviolable logic of inquiry
and observation spelled out in the deepest
possible constructs of semantic and quantitative
symbolization, precluding the elective judgment
and behavioral alternative which does not meet
the requirements of the most fundamental
criteriology which philosophic thought can
produce—the particular science of Differential
Education for the Gifted is the critical need now
still more than in the 1940’s and 1950’s when
its rudiments might have been forged our but
were not.
[IV:2, February 1980]
Forging out, from a very pluralistic
Dynamic and Deficits wrapping around
a Core, the Criteriology of the Maelstrom
of Matrices in the Field at Hand
Also sprach a certain Virgil S. Ward, a professor
of education (what else?) at the University of
Virginia. We lifted all that neat stuff from a
snappy little article called “Washington Policy
Seminar,” Ward’s rhapsodic reflections on a
synod of so-called “talented/gifted” educationists.†
Ward is not without a tiny gift of his own. He
lurches with ease into astonishing figures of
speech. He tells of the smoldering welter, the
subjugated clarion call, the seed in the scenario,
and the maelstrom in the field, in which, most
unaccountably, special interests demand a place.
But such snippets do him less than justice. Here’s
the real thing.
†
You really should have your own copy of the
complete text. It’s splendid for reading aloud at parties.
Write to Gifted/Talented Education, 97 Mill Plain Rd.,
Branford, CT 06405. Ask for the issue for December,
1979. The “editor,” Rudolph Pohl, Ed. D., will be
proud to send you a copy.
That, alas, does do him justice. His blithe blurts
of primitive poetastasy are all too rare, like flies in
the farina, repellent maybe, but at least worthy of
comment. He is more often laying waste his
powers by distinguishing a virtual void from a
mere void and inventing really neat stuff, like
fundamental criteriology and the deepest possible
constructs of semantic and quantitative
symbolizations. That last bit, of course, is the
“gifted/talented” way of saying “numbers and
words,” or, to be precise, the deepest possible
numbers and words. And “available in any given
era or short term period” is the deepest possible
gifted/talented
construct
of
semantic
symbolization for the word “available.”
If you are thinking that Ward’s writing would
merit a fat F in freshman composition, you’re
right, of course, but you’ve revealed yourself
ungifted/untalented. You have fallen into fallacy,
not realizing that “articulated developmental
experience at the transcendent plane of
complexity” cannot waste time on clear writing
and thought, which can only be “intra-personal
[intra, you got that?] peaks of performance
potential.” But who better than Ward himself to
explain?
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subtle but consequential misunderstandings,
e.g., that DEG is bent upon the evocation of
intra-personal peaks of performance potential
among the general school-age population,
regardless of comparative status of these peaks.
And dare we even raise the question and risk
important misunderstanding on our own part,
whether the time has come firmly to insist that
education in the arts among the general
populace, while supportive of the rarer talent,
does not comprise the necessary objective of
quintessential experience brought into the
service of distinctive aptitude and performance
potential on the part, now as ever, of the rarer
few. [No, he doesn’t use question marks.]
Ah yes, the rarer few, of whom there are even
fewer than there are of the merely rare few. How
lucky they are to have Ward & Co. to disregard
the comparative status of their peaks and to
provide for them the necessary objectives of
quintessential experience in the service of aptitude
and potential. The larks will be lucky, too, when
the dodos return among us to teach the silly
twitterers to fly and sing. Then larks, now merely
rare, will soon be a rarer few, and we’ll all get
more sleep, won’t we?
[IV:5, May 1980]
Sayings Brief and Dark
In accordance with their textbooks, they are
always in motion; but as for dwelling upon
an argument or a question, and quietly
asking and answering in turn, they can no
more do so than they can fly. . . . If you ask
any of them a question, he will produce, as
from a quiver, sayings brief and dark, and
shoot them at you; and if you inquire the
reason of what he has said, you will be hit
with some other new-jangled word, and you
will make no way with any of them. Their
great care is, not to allow of any settled
principle either in their arguments or in their
minds, . . . for they are at war with the
stationary, and do what they can to drive it
out everywhere.
NO, that is not an extract from a report of a
convention of curriculum facilitators, or a tale told
out of school by someone who escaped from a
teacher academy with all of his faculties intact. It
is—and we always find this sort of thing
refreshing—a passage from Plato, who never even
heard of educationists, and who never had to. He
knew the archetype, the ideal, of which our bold,
innovative thrusters are just local and ephemeral
appearances—just our bad luck.
The speaker is a certain Theodorus, and he is
talking not about educationists but about some
Ephesians who have adopted the notion that
knowledge is perception and, therefore, as
mutable and diverse as the world and different for
every perceiver. And it is because they deny the
possibility of permanent and universally pertinent
principle, or of any “truth” that might be supposed
to exist whether anyone perceives it or not, that
they are said to be “at war with the stationary.”
We don’t know much philosophy around here,
but we sure do know a neat idea when we see one,
and that is one neat idea. It means, among hosts of
other neat things, that we are OK, that we don’t
have to know much philosophy around here. We
can perceive just as well as the next monthly. And
when you come to think of it, or even when you
don’t come to think of it, you can easily perceive
it as a really democratic idea, the very idea we
need to prove the worth of rap sessions in which
eight-year-olds can decide all about abortion and
alternative lifestyles and which passenger to throw
out of an overloaded lifeboat.*
They actually do this in the schools. It’s called the
Lifeboat Game, which proves that school has its lighter
side. The dull labors of math and grammar are offset by
playful interludes of childlike chatter as to who shall
live and who shall die.
The game provides a dramatis personae clearly
differentiated by “socially significant” attributes: age,
sex, ethos, calling, and other such contingencies by
virtue of which a person is also a local and temporal
manifestation. This is not one of the contexts in which
educationists choose to warble paeans to “the
uniqueness and absolute worth of the individual.”
(Inconsistency troubles them not at all; they are at war
with the stationary.) In this case, the verdict must be
relevant,” conducive to “the greatest good for the
greatest number,” and the exclusive focus on accepted
notions of “social usefulness” assures that a decision
will be made. Another kind of inquiry—whether it is
*
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Theodorus, however, took no harm greater than
exasperation from his visit to Ephesus. He was not
obliged by law to spend twelve years among the
practitioners of quality philosophy. Nor did he
enroll in an Ephesian equivalent of a teacher
academy, so that he might experience slogans and
incantations
relevant
to
outcomes-based
instruction
modalities
and
enhancement
facilitation.
We, on the other hand, cannot go home. Athens
is fallen, and Ephesians peddle tacky souvenirs
among the ruins. There is no dwelling upon
argument, but only the rap session, no quietly
asking and answering in turn, but only privileged
self-expression in the recitation of the latest
notions.
We are led into these melancholy reflections by
a sad and exasperated letter from a faithful reader.
He is in the school business, but is obviously still
a thoughtful person.
He was filling out yet another of those countless
and mind-numbing forms that educationists, given
sufficient funding, of course, dearly love to cook
up and send around. (They call that “research,”
and the “answers”—usually nothing more than
choices checked off by bored and angry people
justifiably thirsty for revenge—they call “data.”)
The poor man, who is not an educationist, but a
teacher, the lowest rank there is in the school
better to do or to suffer an injustice, for instance, or
whether the common good is more to be prized than the
good—would preclude decision and spoil the game,
sending all the players back to the tedium of math and
grammar. Schoolteachers, in any case, are usually kept
ignorant even of the possibility of such inquiries, but
they have been told all about self-worth and how to
enhance it.
The children who “play” the game usually decide to
dump an old clergyman, a man who is supposed to be
prepared for that sort of thing—being fed to sharks by
a committee of children, that is. A busty young
country-western singer will be preserved. She has
many long years ahead of her in which to maximize her
potential and serve the greatest good by entertaining
the greatest number. And she is supposed to be
prepared for that sort of thing—being elevated to
wealth and power by a very large committee of
children.
What a pity that Himmler and Goebbels and all that
crowd are dead. They’d make really neat resource
persons for the Lifeboat Game. Well, there’s still Rudy
Hess, and we might even find Mengele.
business, read these words of wisdom from his
betters:
As the individual staff member considers a
program of self-improvement, attention should
be given to the ability to impart knowledge.
Something must have snapped in his mind.
We’ll never know exactly what caused it. Maybe
it was that lofty Passive Imperative: “Attention
Should Be Given.” Maybe it was the realization
that he, a mere individual staff member, couldn’t
even identify those of his colleagues who might be
of the other kind. In any case, he did what you are
never supposed to do in the school business. He
looked at one of those sayings, brief and dark, and
actually thought about it. Should that sort of antisocial behavior become common in our schools,
there would be an end to educationism, which
depends absolutely, like any other cult, upon the
credulousness of its adherents, and which, like
any other cult, fosters credulousness by giving
catechism the name of “education.”
The brief, dark saying that caught our
correspondent’s mind was that pious and oftintoned mantra: “The Ability to Impart
Knowledge.” How he thought about that, we can’t
tell you in detail, but in principle we can tell you,
because the principles are stationary. He dwelt
upon the question; he did not appreciate it or
interact with it. He asked and answered in turn; he
did not rap. He inquired the reason of what was
said; he did not relate to the reasons for saying it.
He put questions like these: Does knowledge
need imparting, whatever that is, or would telling
be enough? When knowledge is told by stones and
stars, who is the teacher, and in what statements
can we describe the knowable properties of his
“abilities”? If the imparting of knowledge is the
telling of what is so, who can lack that ability,
except the insane, the imbecilic, the comatose, the
irretrievably deluded, or the pathologically
mendacious? If, however, that imparting of
knowledge is something other than the telling of
what is so, what, exactly, are its properties? Can
we consider the “ability” to do it, or judge
whether it ought to be done, without knowledge of
its nature? Is knowledge not that which needs
beholding rather than assertion, and is the habit of
diligent inquiry not the parent of beholding? As to
the worth of teachers, and especially teachers of
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teachers, ought we not to judge of their habits and
ways of inquiry instead of their self-proclaimed
and utterly unintelligible “ability to impart
knowledge”?
Still, as at least one man we know will surely
testify, you can learn a thing or two—well, not
from, exactly, but because of those people. Maybe
that’s the secret of a good teacher academy, a
place where the students, sitting still and thinking,
could just observe the educationists leaping from
tree to tree in their natural habitat.
[VI:8, November 1982]
The Master of those Who Know
And raising my eyes a little I saw on high
Aristotle, the master of those who know
ringed by the great souls of philosophy.
knowledge: Knowledge is defined as the
remembering of previously learned material.
This may involve the recall of a wide range
of material, from specific facts to complete
theories, but all that is required is the
bringing to mind of the appropriate
information. Knowledge represents the
lowest level of learning outcomes in the
cognitive domain.
THAT intriguing definition comes from a “Pilot
Curriculum” plan of “Program Gifted and
Talented” in the Lakota Local School District. We
don’t know where that is—the document came
from a careful informant—but it doesn’t make any
difference Lakota is everywhere.
The definition is miniature rehash of a section
of Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, a book
little known and little read, but influential beyond
all measuring. It is at once the New Testament of
the cult of educationism and a post-post-Hegelian
plan to describe the life of the mind in such a way
that educationists might suppose themselves
“scientific,” and thus win at last the respect of
academe, which ordinarily dismisses them as
addled appreciators not only of the Emperor’s
clothing but of each of his frequent changes of
clothing.
Luckily for the educationists, very few
academics bothered their heads about TEO. If they
had, the aspiring scientists of educationism might
have suffered something more than mere
disrespect. However, while the academics’
ignorance of this work is easy to understand, for
the book is less fun to read than the customs
regulations for the import of plucked poultry, it is
less easy to forgive.
Although the Taxonomy seems to have been sort
of “written” by a committee, the “credit” is
usually given to its editor and principal instigator,
a certain Benjamin S. Bloom. Bloom is to
educationism what Aristotle is to thought, which
is to say, not exactly the master of those who
know, but at least, by Bloom’s own definition, the
master of those who remember previously learned
material.*
Even a glance here and there into Bloom’s
Taxonomy would at least have prepared us, as
long ago as 1956, for the otherwise unaccountable
results of American schooling.
You may, for instance, have wondered how it
can be that a generation of Americans seems
never to have heard of anything, and knows only
as much of our history as the television industry
finds it profitable to show them It may have
bemused you to hear how many college students
in Miami were unable to locate Miami, or the
North Atlantic Ocean, for that matter, on a map. It
may have been a sad surprise to discover how
many Americans could neither recognize nor
approve certain provisions of the Bill of Rights,
and how few social studies teachers in Minnesota
*
Bloom is still extant. His latest, and probably most
startling discovery is that students who study more will
often learn more than students who study less. Such a
complicated idea is difficult even for the professionals
to grasp—and “remember as previously learned
material”—without a master of those who know who
can tell them all about the enhancement of learning
outcomes through time-on-task augmentation. And it is
of such wisdom that Bloom has fashioned the bold,
innovative thrust now widely known, and hailed with
capitals, as Mastery Learning. The rules for Mastery
Learning, however, and not surprisingly, turn out to be
not rules for some way of learning, but for a way of
teaching: First, teach someone something—some
“material,” maybe. Next, give him a test. If he passes,
good; go on to something else. If he flunks, start over.
Keep at it. Stunning. What next?
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were able to make any statements of fact about
Fascism. Such things are not, as generosity, or
hope, might dispose you to presume, anomalies,
rare and freakish failures of a process that
ordinarily produces quite different results. They
are in the program.
In the pursuit of mere knowledge, “the lowest
level of learning outcomes in the cognitive
domain,” educationists are selectively vigorous.
They do give each other pretty diplomas for the
sort of “research” that reveals that seventeen
percent of those guidance counsellors in Buffalo
who double as volley-ball coaches never studied
volley-ball in teacher school. But where anyone
not a candidate for an Ed. D. is concerned, they
find knowledge less deserving of high honor, and
those who would foster it less than perfect in
pedagogy. “Because of the simplicity of teaching
and evaluating knowledge,” says the Taxonomy,
on knowledge” small enough to be in proportion
to that development?
If there is an “emphasis on knowledge all out of
proportion,” to what is it out of proportion? How
much time and effort should be reserved for a
duly proportionate “emphasis” on whatever it is
that is not knowledge?
There is a word for that which is not knowledge.
It is ignorance. But Bloom and his friends must be
either consummately cagey or colossally obtuse in
championing ignorance.
They begin by claiming, maybe, that knowledge
isn’t really knowledge in any case;
It is assumed that as the number of things
known by an individual increases, his
acquaintance with the world in which he lives
increases. But, as has been pointed out before,
we recognize the point of view that truth and
knowledge are only relative and that there are
no hard and fast truths which exist for all times
and all places. (p. 32)
it is frequently emphasized all out of proportion
to its usefulness or its relevance for the
development of the individual. (p. 34)
Well, there. You see? Who can demonstrate that
the ability to locate Miami is useful or relevant to
the development of the individual? And if the
answer is “no one,” how shall we answer the
obvious other question: Who can demonstrate that
it isn’t? Who can say—who can know enough to
say—that this or that particle of knowledge is not
worth having?
It is not out of ignorance that we discover
understanding. It is exactly because of what we
already know that we can know more, that we can
discern organizing principles, and make and test
hypotheses, and act rationally. But all of that is
not the end to which the acquisition of knowledge
is intended by Bloom, et al.
That end is rather the typically slippery and
empty “development of the individual.” To decide
that some degree of “emphasis on knowledge” is
“all out of proportion” to the “development” of
millions of “individuals,” or even of one, is
several steps beyond effrontery. Some might say
that it borders on blasphemy. We are content to
call it the hubris of invincible ignorance, which
quite naturally and appropriately afflicts those
who denigrate knowledge. What do they know,
who know the “correct” nature of the
development of the individual? Is a general and
pervasive ignorance the result of some “emphasis
Well, we recognize that point of view too. It was
a hot item towards the end of sophomore year,
when its titillating paradoxicality brought on neat
bull-sessions as to whether that statement could
itself be permanently true. However, while the
Bloomists seem to admit only to recognizing the
sophomore’s delight, that is due not to cautious
thoughtfulness, but only to imprecision of
language. In fact, they subscribe to it, and derive
from it a grand scheme of “education” depending
on the belief that nothing can be known.
It is to support that belief that they must define
knowledge only in a trivial sense. As though to
prove the vanity of all learning, they point out that
“punctuation is solely [that probably means
“only”] a matter of convention.” We know that.
And we can know its requirements and principles.
The Taxonomy gladly informs us that “how we
pictured the atom” has changed, Which is as
enlightening as the fact that Aristotle could not
have located Miami either. And, most important,
because this kind of assertion will lead to the
Taxonomy’s true agenda, the promotion of
“education” as “modification in the affective
domain,” the demonstration of “what is
knowable” concludes by calling to witness “the
cultural aspect” of knowledge.
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“What is known to one group is not necessarily
known to another group, class, or culture,” Bloom
tells us. As to whether that is a statement about
“the knowable,” there is a test. Just read it again,
putting “knowable” where “known” appears. It is
to be hoped that not even Bloomists would say
that there could be some knowledge accessible to
Arabs but not to Jews, but that is what they say
when the contrive a definition of knowledge that
will permit the inclusion of attitudes, beliefs, and
feelings, or any other variety of supposed
knowledge Those things, all of them “previously
learned material” all too easily remembered, make
up that other category, to which an “emphasis on
knowledge” is “all out of proportion” for “the
development of the individual.” Those are the
things that the Bloomists wanted “education” to
be all about. And it is.
Aristotle was partly right. Some, by nature, do
desire to know; some remember previously
learned material.
[VII:1, February 1983]
Prometheus Rebound
Of human kind,
My great offense in aiding them, in teaching
The babe to speak, and rousing torpid mind
To take the grasp of itself—of this I’ll talk;
Meaning to mortal men no blame, but only
The true recital of my own deserts.
For, soothly, having eyes to see they saw not,
And hearing heard not; but like dreamy phantoms,
A random life they led from year to year,
All blindly floundering on.
ÆSCHYLUS - Prometheus Bound
The understanding, like the eye, whilst it
makes us to see and perceive all things,
takes no notice of itself; and it requires art
and pains to set it at a distance and make it
its own subject.
JOHN LOCKE
WE CAN now begin to make out, monstrously
looming in the near distance, the swelling hulk of
the next bold, innovative thrust, the great lurch
forward into Thinking. It will bring us, at first,
Basic Minimum Thinking. Next, so that
consultants and departments of educationism may
thrive even in an Age of Thought, there will come
in-service
thinking workshops, so
that
schoolteachers
can
acquire
enhanced
appreciations of this newest pedagogical modality.
Then, either to pass the buck or spread the wealth,
there will arise among us comprehensive
programs of Thinking across the Curriculum,
engendered by the exciting discovery that even in
family living courses and driver training at least
some rudimentary form of thinking might be
justifiable. And, at the end of it all, professors of
geography and Medieval literature will be hanging
on to their jobs by teaching two or three sections
of Remedial Thinking.
Although the seeds of this movement can hardly
be said to have been sown, they did at least fall
among the thistles as long ago as 1981. In the fall
of that year, when the young victims of the Basic
Minimum Competence Frenzy came back to
school for more of the same, the National
Assessment of Educational Progress discovered
that seventeen-year-olds had suffered “sharp
declines in inferential comprehension.” The
results of its standard test, said the NAEP, seemed
to “signal some erosion in older teenagers’
thinking and evaluative skills.”
At first, before the educationists realized that
they were hearing the distant rumble not of a new
storm of abuse but of an onrushing band wagon,
they tried to explain away this new erosion by
reminding us that we had burdened them with the
old one. Here we are, fighting for functional
literacy, they said, and bringing the blessings of
minimum competence into the land! How can we,
saddled with your petulant demands for mere
basics, also be held responsible for the teaching of
“higher-order” skills? We can hardly be expected
to teach reading, writing, and ciphering, and also
thinking at the very same time, you know, and
without even a penny of thinking-funding either!
It must have that last point that lit their bulbs.
Nowadays they say: Well, of course, we could
teach thinking too, if that’s what you want, but we
would have to have . . . And their shopping list
will make such folk as the environmental
awareness
educationists
and
consumer
educationists look like shy pikers. As “vital” as all
such educations surely are, Thinking Education
deserves some big money.
And then there are serious considerations, which
arise not so much from the silly, self-serving
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behavior of our educationists as from the
ideological presumptions that underlie all their
behavior, all their practices and beliefs. From
those who have never even defined education
except as anything and everything done in
schools, who neither own nor seek any firm
principles by which to distinguish education from
training, or socialization, or persuasion, or even
from entertainment, what can we expect as a
definition of “thinking”? By what principles, if
any, will the idolaters of the Affective Domain
distinguish thinking from guessing, or hoping, or
remembering, or daydreaming, or, for that matter,
from their most prized “mental” acts,
appreciating, relating, and self-esteeming?
And what evidence can we find in the results of
their practice and the ludicrous curricula of their
own academies as to the quality of the
educationists’ thinking about thinking? Are their
inane questionnaires and the jargon-laden
banalities of their pathetic “scholarship” the
“pains and arts” by which they understand the
understanding? Is it through awareness
enhancement and arranging the desks in a circle
that the torpid educationistic mind has come to
take the grasp of itself, and to the power of
leading others in that enterprise?
We already have a hint as to what “thinking”
will become in the schools. The National Council
of Teachers of English has recently discovered
that “thinking and language are closely linked.”
(NYT, Education Survey supplement, Jan. 9,
1983.) Although that may seem a tiny step
forward for that crowd, we have to see it in the
pale and flickering light of their announced beliefs
about the language to which they now find
thinking so “closely” linked. Will the same rules
of cultural relativity and political expediency
govern their “teaching” of both? Will they
concoct some kind of “holistic scoring” by which,
without fussing about the “trivial mistakes,” to
judge of the better and the worse in the practice of
logic? Will they discover other thinkings, just as
“valid” and worthy of “respect” as that kind of
thinking that just happens to be the current and
socially acceptable habit of the “dominant class”?
The questions are, of course, rhetorical, for the
NCTE has already begun to make just such
discoveries. “A policy statement by [that]
organization,” says the Times,
suggested that teachers approach thinking skills
from three directions—teaching creative
thinking to recognize relationships that lead to
new ideas, logical thinking to create hypotheses
and detect fallacies, and critical thinking to ask
questions and make judgments.
And there we have already three “thinkings,”
which is only the barest of beginnings in that
blindly teeming system that has already brought
us a swarm of “educations” and even a little pack
of “writings.” Soon there will he absurdities like
Civic Thinking, Driving Thinking, Environmental
Thinking, Family Thinking, and probably even
Health and Personal Grooming Thinking, for so it
is that empires grow and the goodies are passed
around in the merry old land of educationism.
But there is much more at issue here than
routine featherbedding, so, difficult as it is, we
must try not to be facetious about the NCTE’s
“policy statement.” (At this very instant, in fact,
we are trying not to imagine how it came to pass
that a band of schoolteachers suddenly decided,
by golly, that the time had come for an official
policy on thinking. Yeah. It’s as though the Pope
were to . . . Enough! We have to stop this right
now.)
So let’s examine their “policy.” Do they truly
suppose that “creative” thinking need not be
logical thinking, that “logical” thinking is not the
thinking by which to “recognize relationships that
lead to new ideas,” that “critical” thinking is
going to detect fallacies without being logical
thinking? Is the making of judgments achieved in
one thinking and the creation of hypotheses in
another? Do we need yet one more thinking, still
to be named, by which to make judgment of
hypotheses, and still another by which to form
hypotheses about the provenance of weird
judgments?
But again, enough. Such a game of words could
go on forever, just like the list of “thinkings.” It is
by means of such games, and out of a remarkably
superstitious belief in the reality of anything that
can be named, that they have cooked up such
things as microteaching and experiential continua,
which can be elaborated (and funded) without any
consideration at all of what is meant by “teaching”
or by “experience.”
In educationists, there dwells the demon
Kakepistemé, who spake by the prophets of
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socialization through Ed. Psych. 101. He
diligently compels them to define backwards, and
without regard to the nature of what is being
defined. As to education, for instance, they begin
by guessing that some socially acceptable
“outcomes” must be the result of education—
making a living, for example, or appreciating a
line from Hamlet, or being able to balance a
checkbook and write a letter of application. Thus,
by the educationists’ definition, it is the same
thing that brings about, in one case, the mind of
John Stuart Mill, and, in another, the practice of
brushing between meals.
So, too, will it be with thinking, for the
educationists have no principle to distinguish it
from their precious idol, problem-solving. Thus
they can say, and believe, this sort of thing:
Thinking is the one skill that makes street-smart
kids so adaptable. They know how to solve the
problems of the street, and now they have to
learn how to apply those skills in the classroom.
Those are the words, as quoted by the Times, of
one Charlotte Frank, executive director of the
Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the
public schools of New York City. If there be
justice in the fabric of the universe—a
consideration that calls not for problem-solving
but for thinking—Frank will be demoted to the
lowliest rank in education, teacher, so that those
adaptable street-smart kids can go and apply their
skills in her classroom.
So, it is thoughtfulness is it, by virtue of which
those street-smart kids are what they are? And it
must be out of an even greater thoughtfulness—
the “creative” kind, maybe?—that their older
counterparts, and mentors, are what they are. And
what of the rats, the astonishing, problem-solving
rats of New York, not only surviving but actually
prevailing in an implacably hostile and
enormously complicated environment?
To lead, however successfully, in the streets or
in the board-rooms, a life of problem-solving is to
lead “a random life from year to year,” a life
directed not from within by principle, but from
without by accident. There is surely no
recommendation in the fact that countless millions
lead such lives; there is rather a reminder that
thinking is not a “survival skill.” While the
thoughtful may prosper by thoughtfulness, they
also may not. Utterly unlike the street-smart kids,
who know just what they want and exactly how to
get it, the thoughtful are at least occasionally
handicapped in the Great Struggle for Survival by
nagging questions as to whether they should want
what they want and whether the getting would he
worthy. If Charlotte Frank is right. if success in
the schools’ version of Thinking Education comes
easiest to the street—smart, then we know
something about the schools. We don’t need to
damn the whole system and all of its deeds. Its
Charlotte Franks will do that for us, as they
always have.
Maybe she just wasn’t thinking when she said
that.
And that leads to the big question: Who are they
to teach our children how to think? For years we
have examined the dreadful language of
educationism, not simply to display its pitiable
ineptitude, which is merely entertaining, but to
analyze the work of the mind as done by those
who are charged with the making of theory and
policy and the training of teachers for the public
schools of America. We have to conclude that the
“professionals” who make our schooling what it is
must have been standing behind the door when
Prometheus was handing out gifts. They persevere
in blindly floundering on.
And it’s too bad, because it is, in fact, so easy to
teach the rudiments and habits of thinking that it
could be done even in our schools! But first, those
who are to do the teaching will have to follow
Locke, and contrive, through art and pains, to do
some thinking about thinking. To seek the
understanding of understanding, the mind’s grasp
of itself, is nothing but the first stirring of
thoughtfulness. After that, it gets easier, and even
children can do that.
For that, we have the testimony not only of
experience and Plato, of whom educationists seem
to know nothing, but also of one Matthew
Lipman, director of an Institute for the
Advancement of Philosophy for Children, at
Montclair State College in New Jersey. Here, in a
letter to Basic Education (April, 1983), he says
something very important:
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I find myself quite uncomfortable with the
notion that reason and inquiry skills are “higher
order skills.” . . . I find skills like classification,
concept formation, inference, assumption-
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finding, criterion-analysis, analogy analysis, and
the furnishing of reasons to be in fact
rudimentary.
Much more worthy of being called “higherorder skills” are reading, writing, and
computation. The reasoning and inquiry skills
are relatively simple and eminently teachable.
One might think of them, together with mental
acts, as fairly atomic, in contrast with which
reading, writing, and computation are
enormously complex and molecular.
To begin the teaching of thinking with that
understanding
would
make
sense,
but
educationists, hearing, hear not. When they hear
that “thinking” is not a “higher—order skill,”
they’ll go right back to the professional stuff,
writing letters of application for jobs and playing
the Lifeboat Game.
[VII:3, April 1983]
IV
Basic
Minimum Christianism
Uncomfortable Words
I say unto you, Every word that a
clergyperson shall speak, he/she shall give
account thereof in the Day of Judgment.
WE
don’t usually trouble ourselves with the
jargon or gobbledygook of elected officials or
captains of industry. If voters and stockholders
can find no fault in the babble of mindlessness
and mendacity, they have their reward. For the
same reason, we have ignored the trendy claptrap
of pop religiosity, stoically denying ourselves
even the easy pickings to be found in what
William Buckley has so perfectly named “The
Rolling Stones Version of the Book of Common
Prayer.” But even our saintly forbearance has its
limits, and Edward W. Pierce, III, a self-confessed
clergyperson in Akron, has exceeded them.
In a recent issue of a newsletter called
“minister,”
we
found Edward Pierce’s
prescriptions for “Using the Pastoral Relations
Committee as a Support Structure.”* Hear what
uncomfortable words he saith:
The schematized model that follows is an
attempt to visualize a pastoral/ministerial
relations committee that will be a support
structure. This paradigm is in no way meant to
be a final or complete answer to the quest for a
viable support mechanism for clergy. It is a
model recommended by the interface of the
study, experience, resources and evaluation of
three years’ experience in my own ministry.
Now that’s exactly the sort of thing that will
happen to anyone who lets an interface, especially
the interface of the experience of his experience,
recommend a model, a schematized one, at that,
importantly different, no doubt, from an ordinary,
unschematized model, which passeth all
understanding anyway. To be sure, what actually
does follow looks more like a simple outline than
a model, schematized or not, but we can’t be sure.
This is our first encounter with a model that is an
attempt to visualize a committee, a committee that
will be a structure. But then, religion is a
mysterious business, isn’t it? It even allows room
for the existence of a paradigm “in no way” meant
to be the answer to a quest but well worth putting
forth anyway. (“In no way” is probably a more
pious version of “not,” as in: Thou shalt in no way
covet thy neighbor’s viable support mechanism,
nor his ox. On another hand, however, it may be
from a hitherto unsuspected translation of a once
famous Pauline admonition: “Let thy Yea be Yea
and thy Nay, in no way.”)
We are not taken in by Pierce’s calling. We
know the language of the clouded mind when we
see it, and we have to conclude, with dismay but
not surprise, that the educationists have infiltrated
the seminaries. When he describes his “viable
support mechanism,” Pierce is also describing,
and in standard pedaguese, the typical class in an
“education” course:
We suspect that the lower case m in “minister” is not
an example of the cockroach typography we were
discussing last month. Maybe it’s simple humility?
*
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The type of process with which I have had the
best success is the problem-solving variety. In
this arrangement, there is a problem poser who
defines the issue as succinctly as possible; a
facilitator who acts as a clarifier and maintains
the process; and problem-solvers who compose
the rest of the group, seeking to elaborate and
support the issue by suggesting various
alternatives and solutions.
It’s all there. The type is not only a variety but
also an arrangement, a series of pointless
distinctions, like those elements, aspects, and
facets, without which the teacher-trainers might
actually discover that they have nothing to say.
The problem, however, is also called an issue, as
though problems and issues, unlike types and
varieties, required no distinction. And that makes
a problem—or is it an issue?—for those hapless
problem-solvers. When they ought to be busy
solving the problem, they are set instead to the
curiously inappropriate task of elaborating the
issue (whether succinctly or not we don’t know),
and to the absolutely incomprehensible task of
supporting the issue. And then there is that
facilitator, who, not content even with that exalted
rank, insists on acting as a clarifier, thus
undermining himself by implying the need of a
clarifier who knows how to act as a facilitator,
lest facilitation be left undone.
And when Pierce gets to his outline, the one he
calls a “schematized model,” he provides the
mind-twisting suggestion that the pastoral
relations committee include “between 3 to 5
members.” Try to figure that one out. Shortly
thereafter, we come to item 4, “Choosing and
Implementing Strategy,” under which we find, of
course, as item 4a: “Input and Inclusion of
Spouse.” There is no 4b. So much for the strategy
of pastoral relations, and a little plug for
sacerdotal celibacy too.
Well, we don’t really care how clergypersons
think and write, since we are not required by law
to drop money into their collection plates. But we
are fascinated by the fact that Pierce’s prose, both
in style and content, is an exact replica of the
mindless maunderings we get from our
educationists, who do make off with great bundles
of legalized swag. Somehow, though, it all makes
sense.
After all, the schools have for decades been
gradually transforming themselves into insipid
and semi-secular churches, preaching the pale
pieties of social adjustment instead of teaching
difficult discipline. At the same time, the churches
have transformed themselves into insipid and
semi-secular schools, teaching the pale pieties of
social adjustment instead of preaching difficult
doctrine. Both have found more profit in peerinteraction perception than in precepts, and
readier rewards in guidance and relating than in
stern standards. No more teacher’s dirty looks,
lest creativity flag, and, lest self-esteem be
disenhanced, no more sinners in the hands of an
angry God. The principal can say with the pastor,
“My brother Esau is a hairy man, but I am a
smooth man.”
And smooth they are, and featureless. We never
hear in their words the ring of a human voice, but
merely the drone of ritual incantation in
something not quite language. They are full of
high sentence indeed, deferential, glad to be of
use, politic, cautious, but not meticulous. They are
Milton’s “blind mouths.” Should Socrates appear
among them, proposing the examined life, or
Jesus, saying “Thou fool! This very night shall thy
self-esteem be required of thee,” they would be
glad to interface and share concerns in a type of
problem-solving variety of an arrangement,
elaborating and supporting the issue and
suggesting various alternatives and solutions.
They, who were to have been the salt of the
earth, the zest of life’s best endeavors, are become
a tepid mess of pottage. Wherewith, indeed, shall
they be salted?
[V:3, March 1981]
The Other Ignorant Army
“When the community appeals to higher
standards of academics, that always kills
spiritual values. All those schools like Yale
and Harvard started out as Christian schools,
but then they got concerned with quality.”
THOSE are the words of the Reverend Mr. Rex
Heath, quoted in Time, June 8, 1981. Heath directs
the life of the mind and the search for knowledge
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at the Mother Lode Christian School in Tuolumne
City, California. He speaks as one who might
stoutly profess obedience to at least two thirds of
the first and great commandment: Thou shalt love
the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy
soul and all thy mind. Sixty-six and two thirds
percent falls short of the perfection commanded
elsewhere, of course, but maybe it’s a passing
grade at the Mother Lode Christian School.
Heath is a member of what calls itself the Moral
Majority, a populous club of dedicated television
watchers who have so industriously practiced
tube-boobery that they can claim to detect
important differences between the randy
imbecility of “Three’s Company” and the
mawkish imbecility of “Little House on the
Prairie.” Other members of the Moral Majority
(or, in memory of that president who brought into
Washington the doctrine of salvation by faith, not
works, the Peanut MM) are the Secretary of the
Interior, who expects that the Second Coming will
take our minds off the high price of fuel, and a
certain Robert Billings, a functionary of the
Department of Education. In his manual for
promoters of new schools safe from concerns with
quality, Billings, whose perceptiveness surpasseth
that of the guidance counsellor who can detect a
two percent drop in self-esteem way down at the
end of the hall, ordains that “No unsaved
individual should be on the staff!”
The “Christian” school movement (it may
comfort some other Christians to see those
quotation marks) is a natural, but often bizarrely
mistaken, reaction to the dismal failures of the
government school systems. (Can that Heath, for
example, actually believe that the public schools
incite godlessness by “appealing to higher
standards of academics,” whatever that weird
locution might mean?) To some it obviously
seems that such a movement is at least a return to
the “basics,” including deportment and posture.
And it is true that many shoestring academies
teach elementary reading, writing, and ciphering
far better than the public schools.
If they do, however, it is not because they are
Christian, but because they are shoestring. Most
of the teachers are amateurs, utterly uncertified.
They just don’t know, poor dears, that before you
can presume to teach, you need some courses in
how to relate, both to self and others, as
individuals and groups; that you must be able to
perceive and diagnose each and every child’s
unique combination of cognitive style and
learning disability; and that you must be proficient
in utilization of audio-visual devices and
implementation of remediation via packets of
nifty learning materials. Serenely ignorant of all
that, and then some, the earnest ladies of the
kitchen table curriculum just go right ahead and
teach. Some of them can probably even make
lemonade, right in their own homes, from actual
lemons!
So the Christian schools—or any small schools
that can exclude from their faculties the graduates,
saved or not, of schools of education—can
provide in a relatively short time that “basic
minimum competence” that, in the public schools,
is still the misty and ultramundane El Dorado of
our highest aspirations. But what then? Is there a
life after basic minimum competence? What will
be the point of reading and writing, themselves
only the barest beginnings of thoughtful literacy,
at the Mother Lode Christian School, where the
vigilant Heath, supported, you’d better believe, by
exactly like-minded colleagues, sleepeth not,
neither slumbereth, keeping guard against
diabolical appeals to higher standards of
academics?
No school governed by ideology—any ideology
whatsoever—can afford to educate its students; it
can only indoctrinate and train them. In this
respect there is no important difference between
the “Christian” schools and the government
schools, although the ruling ideology of the
former is more completely codified and publicly
proclaimed. In the same respect, for that matter,
those schools are not unlike those of the Soviet
Union, which also claim to have on their side THE
TRUTH, although the latter do seem to be the
more devoted to excellence in training.
Having made such assertions, we are led to
wonder what hope there might be of discussing
them with Rex Heath, and how such a discussion
might go. Would both parties be willing simply to
admit that such a discussion might at least be
instructive, and might, at best, provide new
understanding on both sides? Would both be
willing to do the homework, read and consider the
thoughts of many different minds, seek and
organize what can be known, separating it
scrupulously from what can only be inferred or
postulated? Could they so much as agree that
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knowing, inferring, and postulating, as well as the
expectably parlous believing, are in fact different
from each other? Would both be willing and able
to discern and reject even their own non sequiturs
and false analogies? Could there even be
agreement that such a discussion should be
governed by logical principles?
Lacking such conditions, and the skills and
propensities that impose them, there can be no
thoughtfulness, no weighing of conflicting
assertions, no search for understanding, no inquiry
into meaning or worth, and thus, no judgment.
There remain only such things as beliefs, whims,
fancies, notions, and wishes. And bunk.
Those skills and propensities that impose the
conditions in which we can think are the substance
of education, fortuitous side-effects, sometimes,
of training, and absolute impediments to
indoctrination. The skills are the skills of
language, the power of clear and accurate
statement, and of coherent, rational discourse. The
propensities are the habits of a mind accustomed
both to practicing the work of thought in language
and to pondering it as done by others. Among
those propensities are the certainty that rational
discourse will lead to new understandings, since
the possibilities of language have no limits, and,
for the same reason, the doubt that any
understanding can ever be final and perfect. “For
us,” said Eliot, himself a Christian resolute to the
point of relentlessness, and whose works do not
appear very often on lists of approved reading in
the “Christian” academies, “there is only the
trying. The rest is not our business.”
And an “educator’s” business—if that word,
now routinely usurped by the likes of professors
of audio-visual methodology and assistant
superintendents for supplies and Rex Heath, can
ever be rescued from facetiousness—an
educator’s business is trying, and leading students
into all the ways of trying: testing, refining,
probing, weighing, inquiring, essaying, doubting,
wondering, searching. A trainer is properly
excused from such concerns; an indoctrinator
must anathematize them. Thus it is that the
“Christian” academies, out of the very principles
on which they are founded, can never educate
anyone.
In that, of course, they are not worse than the
government schools. They are only just as bad .
What is anathematized in the “Christian”
academies is, in the government schools, derided
as “uncreative” by the practitioners of self-esteem
enhancement; scorned as “authoritarian” by the
rap-sessionists of values clarification; condemned
as “elitist” by the basic minimum competence
drudges as well as the smug egalitarians who
rejoice that a few of the impoverished children
who, if lucky, will spend their lives in dull and
brutish labor, can nevertheless balance their
checkbooks; and, by most others, whose training
in the teacher academy never suggested the
possibility of thinking about thinking, simply
neglected.
It’s no wonder that the Peanut MM thought it
good to rise up and smite those troublers of the
land hip and thigh. But it’s no comfort either. We
are not watching a struggle between the Children
of Light and the Children of Darkness, but the
benighted clash of ignorant armies, in which we,
and millions of children who might have grown
up to be thoughtful and productive citizens, are
caught in the open between the lines.
However,
here
at
The
Underground
Grammarian, we’re not going to let ourselves be
slain as noncombatants. For all that we’ve been
saying for so long about the government schools,
and without the slightest intention of refraining in
the future, we’re going to take their side. And we
urge our readers (or at least those who are not at
this very moment writing in to cancel their
subscriptions) to do likewise and not to remain
silent.
For us, the decision was not difficult. We asked
some questions: Of the parties to this conflict,
which is the more likely to forbid its students
certain books and to make it harder for anyone to
find them? Which would, if it could, close down
pestiferous publications like this one? Which one,
when sufficiently pressed, and we do intend to
press, will eventually accuse its enemies of
warring against God?
Furthermore, the government schools have one
supreme, if unintended, virtue. They are such
chaotic and Byzantine bureaucracies, ruled over
by herds of inept and dull-witted functionaries,
that some good teachers, genuinely devoted to the
life of the mind, can often go undetected for years.
For some few students, those dissidents make all
the difference. But in the “Christian” academies,
much smaller and tightly controlled, the dissidents
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are all too likely to be sniffed out quickly by the
Unsaved Individuals Committee.
The issue is not curriculum or methodology or
family life or even the private enterprise system.
The issue is freedom. The mind simply cannot be
free without the power of thoughtful inquiry. If
the mind is not free to gather knowledge, to form
understanding, to judge of worth, and then, out of
the best that it can do in knowing, understanding,
and judging, will what it deems good, then there
can be no such thing as morality, a system
intended to judge the worth of individual choices.
The “Moral Majority” must be, in fact, some other
kind of organization. Its avowed dedication to
ignorance and thoughtlessness—Heath is not
alone—belies its very name.
Lacking the informed, willing assent of
thoughtfulness, obedience to even some
presumably unexceptionable precept is just
another passion, tepid though it well may be. And
who can be led by unexamined precept into one
passion can as easily be led into another. And still
another. He can be neither free nor moral, only
impassioned. Should there be enough of his kind
noisily applauding themselves for the “sincerity”
and “correctness” of their shared passions, they
will show us what Yeats meant by the “worst,”
who are “filled with passionate intensity.”
And what of the “best”? Are they out there? Is
there a Mental Minority? Was Yeats right about
them too? Have they “lost all conviction”?
It must be so. There is mostly silence, a silence
that seemed at first disdainful, then tactful, then
wary, and that by now has turned simple
cowardice. Those educationists, who have so long
trumpeted their love of excellence, have fled as
usual into the mighty fortress of Low Profile
Poltroonery. Maybe this storm, too, will blow
over, or maybe a savior will come, bearing some
really neat innovations.
Prudent publishers, busily gathering into barns
and ever mindful of textbook adoptions in Texas,
are eager to be oh so open-minded. Albert
Shanker, hoping the ninety and nine can fend for
themselves while he takes care not to lose a duespaying one, tuts a tiny tut from time to time.
“Know ye not,” wrote Saint Paul, who may
have momentarily forgotten about the laborers
who came late to the vineyard, “that they which
run a race run all, but one receiveth the prize?”
History, as H. G. Wells said, and that was way
back then, “becomes more and more a race
between education and catastrophe.” And by
“education” he didn’t mean basic minimum
competence or an indoctrination impervious to
thoughtfulness. However, by “catastrophe” he
meant catastrophe.
Just now, there seems to be only one runner on
the track, and, unhampered by concerns with
quality, undeterred by appeals to higher standards
of academics, he isn’t even looking over his
shoulder.
[V:6, September 1981]
Tongues of Ice
Now when this was noised abroad, the
multitude came together, and were
confounded, because that every man heard
them speak in his own language. And they
were all amazed and marvelled . . .
JOACHIM of Floris turns out to have been right
after all, except for what is probably nothing more
than a trivial error in orthography. The Age of the
Father gave way to the Age of the Son, which has
by now succumbed entirely before the prancing
parameters of the Age of the Wholly Gauche. And
that creepy sound you hear, that whooping
whoosh as of a rushing mighty windbag, signals
the escaping gases of the new dispensation. Where
once a few spoke a language that everyone could
understand, whole multitudes now recite a lingo
that no one can understand.
The Conference of Major Superiors of Men is
made up of the abbots and provincials of various
Roman Catholic religious orders. On February 10,
1981, a day that they might have spent in prayer,
the members of its national board met in
Milwaukee for an “evaluation of CMSM
structures based on the self-studies.” Sounds
familiar? And that’s not all. A certain Sr. Mary
Littell—how did she get into the act?—was
“engaged as facilitator for the day.” Here’s how
she did it, as reported to the assembled worthies in
August. (Yes, even there we have a mole):
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purpose and values, leading to goals, objectives
and finally to implementation. The first and most
important step is at the myth level where the
renewal of ideals, hopes, dreams and traditions
takes place. It is the level of identity and purpose
for being.
The advantage of this process is that it puts all
the elements of an organization not into a flow
chart which is static but into the flow of the
organization which is constantly changing and
dynamic. In the course of the process the board
defined the following elements for evaluation:
The tasks of the board membership and the
religious communities through them (the major
superiors) is one of (1) animating (through clear
identification); (2) facilitating (through acting out
the goals and objectives); and (3) impacting
(through actions on various levels of CMSM).
So now abideth animating, facilitating, and
impacting, these three; but the greatest of these is
impacting.
You will probably want to practice these
virtues. No problem. To animate, just come up
with identifications. Be sure they’re clear, of
course. (See above for clues on clarity.) In no time
at all, you’ll be animating all over to beat the band
and ready to facilitate through acting out goals
and objectives. Cinchy. And then—on to
impacting! Just remember the one, simple secret
of impacting. Action! Action on levels. Various
levels.
And if you run into any trouble, don’t come to
us. Go and consult the nearest Hoover Grid. We
don’t exactly know what that is, of course, but
we’re willing to bet the renewal of ideals, hopes,
dreams, and traditions at the myth level against a
wrinkled old Values Perception/Assessment
Inventory/Questionnaire that you can find one at
your local teacher-training academy.
We know Educanto when we see it, and this
report is full of it. It bristles with “linkage,”
“resourcing” (with “input” from “resource
persons”), “networking,” “sharing,” “crosscultural communications,” and even offers its own
bold, innovative thrust in “ad hocracy,” which is
defined as “creation of task forces for proper
resourcing.” So where is the Inquisition, now that
we need it?
Even the punctuation is typical of a writer who
just can’t be bothered with the meaning of what
he writes. There is a difference between “the
Hoover Grid which begins with the recognition of
purpose” and “the Hoover Grid, which begins
with the recognition of purpose.” The first, which
is what the writer has given us, implies the
horrifying existence of other Hoover Grids
beginning with other recognitions. The same
confused inattentiveness causes “the myth level
where renewal takes place,” to be distinguished
from the other myth levels; “a flow chart which is
static”; and “the flow of the organization which is
constantly changing.” In that one we don’t know
whether to be confused about the flow or the
organization. Or both. Or neither.
But if we are confused, it is because we are
paying attention. This kind of language, devised
to give the tone of sophisticated substance to the
obvious, the empty, and the banal, is always a
dreary and disorderly exercise of robot-like
inattentiveness. The writer’s mind has no stake in
it; he just wants to get out a report that sounds like
a report. The report is exactly one of those “vain
repetitions” of the heathen; it neither provides
clear knowledge nor fosters finer understanding,
except, of course, in the very few who will
actually pay attention. And what they will
understand will not be what the writer would have
had in mind, if he had had anything in mind.
Somewhere in the dark labyrinth of doctrinal
elaboration, there must be a technical name for
this nasty perversion of language and intellect. It’s
probably something like Impactio.
Well, we know in part, and we prophesy in part,
and in part we babble, with the tongues neither of
men nor of angels, reciting what we have often
heard, as blind mouths speak to stopped ears, as
no one speaks to no one.
[V:8, November 1981]
Over the Rainbow Way up High
WE are definitely not in Kansas anymore. We
noticed this weird fact only recently, when an
itinerant nostrum peddler was accused of some
pretty sharp practice and wound up defending
himself before a federal grand jury. He testified
that what he had done was strictly A-OK, and that
he knew this because he had discussed it all in a
face-to-face meeting with Jesus. When asked how
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he knew that it was Jesus, he replied that he had
recognized him from his picture.
We can’t tell you what happened then, but we
can sure tell you what didn’t happen, because if it
had the papers would have been full of it for a
week. So here’s what didn’t happen: The jurors
did not fall down on the floor gasping and
choking with laughter. The lawyers did not rush
whooping from the room, holding their pocket
handkerchiefs before their streaming eyes. In fact,
the only normal human thing that happened there
was that some nut said something stupendously
funny. But everything else was weird.
And only a few weeks later, the same
mountebank, still at large, staged a nuptial
extravaganza in which a thousand or so of his
female followers were more or less married up
with a like number of his male ditto. All agog to
discover more evidence toward an Over the
Rainbow Hypothesis, we tuned it in on the TV.
Sure enough. They were all Munchkins.
Then along came Phyllis Schlafly. She has not
yet admitted to being Glenda the Good, but who
else would go floating around the country in such
a big bubble? And she does admit that she intends
to do a whole lot of Good.
We read about all the Good she plans to bestow
on us in a New York Times account of a big “Over
the Rainbow Celebration” she threw in
Washington (Thirty-five bucks a head, and no
Tupperware selling!) She took the occasion to
announce that she was even going to do Good in
the schools, which was kind of a thrill for us,
because we do need all the help we can get, even
if it comes in a bubble.
Phyllis—gosh, we hope she won’t mind if we
call her that; it’s just that we feel we know her, oh
so well—Phyllis kicked off a campaign to stock
all the schools and libraries with pro-family
books, presumably to replace the anti-family
books, by “such writers as Hemingway,
Steinbeck, Hawthorne, and Twain,” which are
being rooted out of schools and libraries by her
“Eagle Forum” squads. (We don’t know what that
is; we’re guessing that it must be something like
the Lullaby League.)
Now we’ve actually read those writers, and
even lots of others “such as” them, but we never
have been able to figure which ones, and in which
books, and exactly to what degree, are pro-, or
anti-, family, or neither, or both. Those writers are
slippery rascals, who portray lovely families and
rotten families, and people who do well, or ill,
because of the one, or in spite of the other, or
both, or neither, or vice versa, if you know what
we mean by that. And what’s a Mother to do?
So it seemed just peachy that Glenda the Good
was willing to take on the hard task of making
judgments about books. But then we started to
notice something fishy about her powers of
judgment.
She said that sex education, which we have
ridiculed for reasons that still seem cogent, was “a
principal cause of teenage pregnancy.” If we had
to rely on that line of argument, even
educationists would be able to laugh at us.
She said that her “greatest contribution” was
“making sure that eighteen-year-old girls won’t be
drafted,” and that she just couldn’t imagine “a
greater gift.” Well, we had no trouble at all
imagining not just one but lots of greater gifts for
eighteen-year-old girls, starting with the power of
reason. But just as we began to suspect that
Phyllis might be a bit below her grade level in
creative fantasy as an alternative mode of
cognition, she proved us wrong. It turned out that
she could imagine a greater gift, and not just for
the girls, but for all of us. “The atomic bomb,” she
proclaimed, “is a marvelous gift that was given to
our country by a wise God.”
We can’t tell you what happened next, but we
can tell you what didn’t happen next. The partygoers did not fall down on the floor gasping and
choking with laughter. Jerry Falwell (a reverend)
and Jesse Helms (an honorable) did not rush
whooping from the room, holding their pocket
handkerchiefs before their streaming eyes. In fact,
the only normal human thing that happened there
was that some nut said something stupendously
funny. But everything else was weird.
So it is in the merry old land of Oz: no brains,
but lots of diplomas. Honor and reverence,
schooled in the “appreciation” of everyone’s
Right to his opinion, which is as good as anyone
else’s, have learned to “relate to” Unreason. Logic
and fantasy are just alternate modes of cognition,
although the one is difficult and so “elitist,” while
the other is immediately possible for all and
“democratic”; the one sets limits and encourages
“authoritarianism,” while the other knows no
boundaries and releases “creativity.” Feeling,
attitude, belief, awareness, are just as much
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sources of “knowledge” as disciplined study, but
disciplined study is far more likely than the
others, which are “humanistic,” to bring “mere
knowledge” for nothing more than “its own sake.”
Rationality is cold, a sly and clever stunt
performed with tricky language; the babbling gush
of sincerity is a warm and welcome way of selfexpression, which requires not critical scrutiny,
but tolerance for other “values” and “points of
view.”
We don’t see any hope of getting back to
Kansas. But if, someday, some teacher tells the
students that it’s time to learn American history
by role-playing the constitutional convention
while appreciating fife music, and the students all
fall down on the floor gasping and choking with
laughter, then we’ll be heading for home.
[VI:6, September 1982]
The Gingham Dog
and the Calico Cat
The readers of the newsletter were presumably
confirmed in righteousness by an essay linking
what schools do to what Lenin said. It did not
occur to them, apparently, that Luther, to whom
Reason was just “the Devil’s whore,” also said as
much, and, in so saying, echoed whole choirs of
orthodox theologians.
There is only one Education, and it has only one
goal: the freedom of the mind. Anything that
needs an adjective, be it civics education, or
socialist education, or Christian education, or
whatever-you-like education, is not education, and
it has some different goal. The very existence of
modified “educations” is testimony to the fact that
their proponents cannot bring about what they
want in a mind that is free. An “education” that
cannot do its work in a free mind, and so must
“teach” by homily and precept in the service of
these feelings and attitudes and beliefs rather than
those, is pure and unmistakable tyranny. And it is
exactly the kind of tyranny, “tyranny over the
mind of man,” to which Thomas Jefferson swore
“eternal enmity” on—on what?—on “the altar of
God.”
Jefferson was not a bolshevik. He wrote to a
nephew:
FOR some reason, we have not convinced the
rapidly multiplying proponents of the back-tobasics-with-the-Bible “education” movement that
we are not on their side. What’s wrong with us
that we haven’t figured out how to offend those
usually truculent and combative enthusiasts? We
have had no trouble in offending their mirrorimage counterparts, the silly educationists, who
hold exactly the same thematic belief—that
knowledge and reason are not enough, and who
“educate” by exactly the same method the
modification of behavior through persuasion
addressed to the sentiments. The details don’t
matter where the principle is rotten.
One of those “Christian” school newsletters
recently reprinted portions of a piece called “The
Answering of Kautski,” in which we considered
similarities in educationism and bolshevism. We
quoted Lenin’s famous line about “teaching” the
children and planting a seed that will never be
uprooted. We also quoted (and the reprint did
include) a much less familiar Leninism, saying
that most people are not capable of thought, and
all they need is to “learn the words.”
Question with boldness even the existence of
God; because, if there be one, he must more
approve of the homage of reason than that of
blindfolded fear.
No bolshevik can say the equivalent in his
system of belief: Question boldly even the
existence of the dialectical process and the
withering away of the state. Jefferson’s
admonition ought to raise provocative questions
for those who like to claim that the Republic was
founded on their “religious” principles, but it
doesn’t. Bolsheviks are not the only ones who
never think of asking certain questions.
Reason is not the Devil’s whore. It is the
whore’s Devil. To those who have sold their
minds for some comfortable sentiments and
comforting beliefs, Reason is The Adversary to be
hated and feared, the bringer of doubt and difficult
questions, the sly disturber of The Peace. To
children who are led into whoredom, it matters
not at all which sentiments and beliefs they are
given in return for the freedom of their minds.
Whatever the fee, they cannot judge its worth.
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Sometimes it seems that every illusion that
cripples the mind is taught in schools. The silly
notion that if one ideological faction is wrong the
other must be right is planted in our minds by the
belief that true/false tests have something to do
with education. We imagine some real difference
between Republicans and Democrats, liberals and
conservatives, government educationists and
church educationists. They are all alike. Their
prosperity depends on our believing that beliefs
and sentiments, theirs, of course, are somehow
finer, nobler, more virtuous or humane than mere
Reason.
Half past twelve is coming on, and neither the
church cat nor the dog in the manger has slept a
wink. Should we do something, or should we hope
that they’ll eat each other up? Will burglars steal
this pair away? Will the “Christian” newsletter
reprint all this?
[VI:6, September 1982]
V
The Social Scene
I’m All Right, Juanito
If the immigrant who comes here in good
faith becomes an American and assimilates
himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact
equality with everyone else, for it is an
outrage to discriminate against any such
man because of creed or birthplace or origin.
But this is predicated upon the man’s
becoming in very fact an American and
nothing but an American. If he tries to keep
segregated with men of his own origin and
separated from the rest of America, then he
isn’t doing his part as an American.
We have room for but one language here,
and that is the English language, for we
intend to see that the crucible turns our
people out as Americans . . . and not as
dwellers in a polyglot boarding house.
Theodore Roosevelt
There’s no one that can set himself up,
really, and say you must melt.
Renaldo Masiez
WHO, you may ask, is Renaldo Masiez? Well,
Renaldo Masiez is a functionary at our shiny new
Department of Education, where the right hand,
merrily stirring up the melting pot with
“citizenship education,” obviously doesn’t know
that the left hand is concocting a tangy gazpacho
of truculent separatism, of which the flavor may
prove uncongenial to the American palate when
we receive (and translate) a Unilateral Declaration
of Independence from Nueva York.
Masiez himself has melted, right into a good job
in government, where he’s supposed to do
something about the Bilingual Education
Program. The aim of that program, we were told,
was to hasten the melting of some children less
fortunate than Masiez by teaching them in their
own languages while they were learning English
so that they wouldn’t have to be taught in their
own languages anymore. That would not only fit
them for life in this country, but it would also
spare us the pain of teaching everything in
seventy-two languages forever. It seemed a good
idea at the time, but only to people who don’t
know the first damn thing about how public
education works, notably a pack of congressmen,
or to those who saw in it some payoff for
themselves, notably a pack of congressmen. In its
ten years so far, the program has cost about a
billion dollars and has helped, according to
Masiez, “less than one percent of those that were
found to be limited English proficient.” (His
estimate is much too high. We make it
approximately 0.0137 percent when you count in
all the educationists and functionaries who don’t,
as Masiez puts it, “receive minimally adequate
services” but are obviously, just as much as any
schoolchild, proficient in limited English.)
Masiez said those things in a conversation with
Jack Perkins on “Prime Time Saturday.” Perkins
also spoke with the Supremo Director of BE, one
J. Gonzalez, who pronounced a newly discovered
version of our history. The old way, in which
children were taught some English as quickly as
possible and put into regular classes where they
could learn a lot more, was “very ineffective.”
When Perkins, flabbergasted, suggested that the
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evidence did not support such an assertion, and
that the Supremo might just be talking through his
sombrero, Gonzalez, visibly vexed, muttered,
“Well, you could always point to some groups
where it has worked.”
Yeah. Some groups. Poles, Italians, Armenians,
Hungarians, Swedes, Russians, Germans,
Basques, Finns, Turks, Chinese, Portuguese,
Ukrainians,
Japanese,
Danes,
BosniaHerzegovinians, and maybe even a few
Bulgarians. There may be more.
Although school work is now taught in seventytwo foreign languages, a great majority of
students in bilingual programs are, like most of
the people who direct such programs, Hispanic. If
it weren’t for bilingual education, we could expect
that in a few generations those children, their
children, and grandchildren, would be living all
over this land and doing everything that there is to
do, for such was the destiny of “some groups.” As
it is, we are sentencing them to remain forever in
the barrios and to wait on each other in the
bodegas. Masiez and Gonzalez, however, will be
all right.
The Department of Education has decided that
teachers in bilingual programs, once expected to
be bilingual, don’t need to know any English at
all. Bye-bye, bi. And children who have learned
enough English to attend regular classes will be
shot right back into the—lingual program should
their work ever fall below average. That’s a
valuable lesson in humility for the students and a
guarantee of steady work for all those—lingual
teachers.
Imagine now that it was not Gonzalez and
Masiez but Ronald Reagan who said that we
should not require Hispanic children to learn
English, and that what may have worked with
“some groups” wouldn’t work with them. Suppose
that it was the mayor of Los Angeles who said
that the Chicano children should be “prepared for
life in the Hispanic community” where they can
stay with their own kind and preserve their
cultural heritage as much as they like. And try
this, from the Grand Dragon of the KKK: “Well
shoot, they sent no reason atall fer them folks ta
melt. Reckon id be better they don’t, an that’s a
fack.”
There can never be equality of opportunity in a
land where class is labeled in language. Let’s
hope that the bilingual boondoggle never does
find more than one percent of those who “need” it.
Gonzalez and Masiez will still be all right (it isn’t
for success that they get paid), and legions of new
Americans may escape lives of involuntary
servitude.
[IV:7, October 1980]
Voucher, Schmoucher
THERE is very little to be gained and much to be
lost in assuring, through education voucher
schemes or tuition tax credits, that the public
school system will become entirely what it is now
only partly—the last, futile hope of the
permanently dispossessed and disabled. We say
this with testy reluctance, and certainly not, as
regular readers will know, because we can see any
hope that the jargon-besotted and uneducated
tribes of educationists and teacher-trainers will
ever provide the land with literate and thoughtful
citizens, but because there is no chance at all that
credits or vouchers would destroy or even
mitigate the government schools, which have
proven again and again that they can easily digest
and transform into nourishment any complaint
brought against them. As the better and luckier
students—and teachers—escape, our cunning
educationists will have no trouble persuading the
same old agencies and legislatures that they now
need even more money. But the voucher and
credit schemes probably will destroy the worth of
the private schools.
To see why, we must consider some popular,
widely preached misunderstandings:
“The public schools could provide better
education if we gave them more money.” This is
false. We give them far too much money. They
spend it on gimmicks and gadgets and programs
and proposals and whole legions of apparatchiks
and uneducated busybodies and Ladies Bountiful
manquées. The private schools just don’t have that
kind of money. That’s why they’re often so much
better. If we were to enrich the private schools,
most of them would hire the recently disemployed
values clarification facilitators and start offering
courses in environmental awareness enhancement
and creative expression of self-as-individual-self
through collage. In a few years, we would have
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thousands of private schools just as bad as the
public schools are now. Furthermore, bad private
schools, unlike bad public schools, can do as they
damn well please just as long as they can find
buyers for what they choose to sell, and they will
care no more for our opinions, or yours, than the
mongers of obscene T-shirts care about our quaint
canons of taste. The people who run the
government schools can at least be ridiculed and
humiliated in public.
All of that must be seen in the darkness cast by
another popular misunderstanding: “Parents
should be free to choose for their children
whatever kind of education they think best.” This
is not false, for it asserts only a special case of that
right to the pursuit of happiness to which we are
supposed to be committed. It is, however,
irrelevant and (perhaps) unintentionally cynical,
for it presumes the possibility of “free choice” in
countless millions of innocent citizens who have
themselves been “educated” by the lifeadjustment slogan-mongers, and who have come
to “think” that a good education is an
indoctrination in their pet notions and beliefs
rather than someone else’s. Their choices of
schools for their children will be no more the fruit
of informed and thoughtful discretion than their
choices of deodorants and designer jeans. The
support they might withdraw, through vouchers or
credits, from one pack of fools and charlatans they
would fork over to another of the same, which,
furthermore, will usually be an ad hoc
reconstitution of the first pack, now happily
embarked on what is for them just one more
obviously profitable, bold, innovative thrust.
We can understand the angry desperation out of
which even thoughtful citizens can propose, as
remedy for the ills caused by one governmental
contraption,
yet
another
governmental
contraption. And any system for credits will be
exactly that, a wholly owned subsidiary of the
state and a bureaucratic agency for the
propagation of ideology and the enforcement of
“standards.” And the standards will be devised not
by the enthusiasts Of vouchers, who don’t really
know exactly what they want anyway, but by the
same old coalition of educationists and unionists
and politicians and social engineers and
manufacturers of gimmicks and publishers of
pseudo-books, who do know exactly what they
want, and exactly how to get it.
It is simply naive to imagine that our
government, or any government anywhere, will
construe tax credits or vouchers as a way of
letting its citizens keep, and spend as they please,
some of their own money. Such devices will be
thought of as “subsidies,” and loftily denounced,
especially by those whose livelihoods depend
entirely on perpetual subsidization of the public
schools, their pandemic problems, and their
Byzantine and costly governance, as “handouts”
of “public” money. Should credits or vouchers be
provided by law, the same law would have to
provide, as quid pro quo to a tremendous and
noisy lobby of government employees, that most
of the policies and practices that make the private
schools what they are would suddenly become
illegal. When private schools are required to hire
certified graduates of state teacher academies, and
to offer all the mandated mickeymousery of social
adjustment disguised as “studies,” and to make
sure that the ninth-grade textbook for
Appreciation of Alternative Lifestyles doesn’t use
any tenth-grade vocabulary words, then the
erstwhile voucherites will long for the good old
days, when you could at least get what you paid
for, and when the private schools actually were an
alternative to government education.
Those voucher and credit schemes were
probably not cooked up by a conspiracy of
educationists. Those people aren’t that smart. But
you just can’t beat them for luck.
[V:2, February 1981]
Maximum Brain Dysfunction
EVERYBODY
is in a whole lot of trouble.
People all over America are losing their car keys
and even forgetting their own telephone numbers,
to say nothing of their zip codes. A man we know
put an empty shredded wheat box in the
refrigerator, and a lady in Tacoma asked her
husband to pick up a tune of canna fish on his way
home. Three out of four diners in the fanciest
restaurants move their lips while figuring out
fifteen percent of $48.83, and some of them will
find that they have left home without it.
So what, you say? Ha! So you obviously don’t
know the first damned thing about minimal brain
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dysfunction, that’s what. We do know the first
damned thing about that dreaded disorder, and a
supremely damnable thing it is: there are at least
ninety-nine separate and distinct symptoms of
minimal brain dysfunction! You are probably
suffering from about thirty of them right now.
And here’s yet another damned thing: minimal
brain dysfunction is itself only one of a whole
host of “learning disabilities” that educationistic
psychologists have somehow managed to discover
in the last fifty years or more. And the damnedest
thing of all is that when we ask those
educationists why their victims are so ignorant
and thoughtless, they say that they’ll try to puzzle
it out if we’ll just give them more money, and we
give them more money, and they hire each other
as consultants, and the consultants duly discover
yet another, hitherto unsuspected, learning
disability.
So we were recently appalled, but hardly
surprised, by a fat bundle of guidelines called
“Michigan Special Education Rules.” It is only in
theory a separation of goats from sheep; in
practice it is a charter of perpetual employment
for goatherds. Its covert assumptions make the
Doctrine of Innate Depravity look like the
sentimental dream of some bleeding-heart liberal,
for the Doctrine of Universal Impairment has no
counterpart of the Operation of Grace. It looks
instead to the Implementation of Grants.
The Michigan Rules include: “R 340.1706
Determination
of
emotionally
impaired.”
Stubborn neurotics that we are, we just couldn’t
resist the risk of self-knowledge that offers itself
in any list of symptoms. Sure enough, the very
first symptom of “emotionally impaired” was:
Inability to build or maintain satisfactory
interpersonal relationships within the school
environment.
A double whammy! That is precisely the
environment within which every member of our
staff has plenty of trouble with those very
relationships. Furthermore, since literacy has
recently been discovered—within the school
environment—to include lots of that interpersonal
relation stuff, we had to find ourselves illiterate
too!
Reeling with the shock of recognition, we
managed to puzzle out, by lip-movement and
subvocalization,
the
second
symptom:
Inappropriate types of behavior or feelings under
normal circumstances, presumably still “within
the school environment,” although whether that is
a “normal circumstance” is worth some thought.
A mystery. What types of behavior and feelings
are there? Which circumstances are normal? Is it
normal or not, under this very circumstance, to
feel, as we in fact do, a feeling, if not a type of
feeling, remarkably like another symptom of
“emotionally impaired” in Michigan? General
pervasive mood of unhappiness or depression.
So. When it’s three o’clock in the morning of
the dark night of the soul, don’t go near the
guidance office. There will be no waiting around
for Godot in the hallways, no hesitation at the
turning of the stair.
And the thought of all that “school
environment” where all the little Donnies and
Maries are all agog about Be All That You Can
Be Week, and where “to be or not to be” is
definitely not the question, brings on the fourth
symptom of “emotionally impaired”: Tendency to
develop physical symptoms or fears associated
with school or personal problems.
Right. Absolutely right. Bellyache and vertigo.
And fear. Fear and trembling. The simple truth
must out: We are emotionally impaired in
Michigan. A classic case.
Who shall stand when the Impairment Inspector
appeareth? Who shall abide the day of the
Disability Determinator’s coming? Not we,
surely; and, whether out of some inappropriate
feeling or this pervasive mood of depression,
we’re beginning to have some dark suspicions
about you. We can see you, sitting there in some
appropriate
type
of
behavior,
smugly
congratulating yourself on all your swell
interpersonal relations, and wallowing in your
pervasive mood of jollity, without even a touch of
heartburn. Well, just you read this little codicil to
the Four Symptoms:
Page 41
The term “emotionally impaired” also includes
persons who, in addition to the above
characteristics, exhibit maladaptive behaviors
related to schizophrenia, autism, or similar
disorders. The term “emotionally impaired”
does not include persons who are socially
maladjusted unless it is determined that such
persons are emotionally impaired.
SHARETEXT™ The Leaning Tower of Babel
Well, at least you don’t have to worry about
being found emotionally impaired just because
you’re socially maladjusted, unless you are found
emotionally impaired because of certain
maladaptive behaviors that have brought you into
your social maladjustment. When just about all of
us are normally impaired, your sanctimonious
unimpairment is about as maladaptive as you can
get. And forget about trying to convince us that
those behaviors of yours are not related to
schizophrenia or autism. Big deal. What about
those “similar disorders”? Do you have any idea
how many of them there are? All in all, you’re
damn lucky to be living in a country that still has
to put up with all sorts of deviants. In some
countries, those maladaptive behaviors related to
similar disorders could get you shipped off to live
in some very cold place where you’ll probably
end up eating your shoes.
It will not surprise regular readers that all this
determining is done by members of the Affective
Functionary Faction, government agents who keep
watch over how people feel. In Michigan:
The emotionally impaired shall be determined
through manifestation of behavioral problems
primarily in the affective domain, which
adversely affect the person’s education to the
extent that the person cannot profit from regular
learning experiences. . . .
The I of the Beholder
I have now reigned above fifty years in
victory and peace, beloved by my subjects,
dreaded my enemies, respected by my allies.
Riches and honors, power and pleasure,
have waited on my call, nor does any earthly
blessing appear to be wanting for my
felicity. I have diligently numbered the days
of pure and genuine happiness which have
fallen to my lot. They amount to fourteen.
Abd-ar-Rahman III
You have no more right to consume
happiness without producing it than to
consume wealth without producing it.
G. B. Shaw
Indeed, we all wish to be happy, even when
we live in such a way as to make happiness
impossible.
St. Augustine
HERE are some excerpts from a questionnaire
called “Perceptions of Sex Equity for Women
Faculty at Virginia Tech”:
The wonderful thing about that Affective Domain,
and what makes it both the Lotus Land and the
Happy Hunting Ground of educationists and other
pseudo-scientists, is that there is no Bureau of
Weights and Measures in that fair land. To weigh,
to count, and thus to find wanting, are the
appropriate, normal, and profitably adaptive
behaviors of those whose greasy thumbs are on
the scale.
Cardinal Richelieu, who was a member of an
Affective Functionary Faction in his time, knew
how to determine maladaptive behaviors too. “If
you give me six sentences written by the most
innocent of men,” he said, “I will find something
in them with which to hang him.” What can it
mean for our times that a wily conniver of the bad
old days suddenly sounds so refreshingly honest?
[VI:4, April 1982]
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This section relates to your general feelings of
satisfaction with your personal work situation as
a Virginia Tech faculty member. In terms of
your personal situation at Virginia Tech, how
satisfied are you that . . .
This section relates to your perceptions of bias
against women faculty at the University and
attempts to identify areas where inequities may
exist. Do you feel that problems of bias against
faculty women exist at Virginia Tech in the
following areas . . .
This section relates to your feelings about the
treatment that faculty women would receive if
they voiced concern about sexual harassment or
discrimination. Do you feel that women faculty
at Virginia Tech would get a fair hearing on
concerns about sexual harassment or
discrimination in the following places . . .
Virginia Tech is an affirmative action employer.
This section relates to your perceptions of the
success of the various affirmative action efforts
with respect to women faculty. How successful
has Virginia Tech been at ensuring that . . .
SHARETEXT™ The Leaning Tower of Babel
This section relates to your feelings about the
need for additional efforts to ensure equitable
treatment for Virginia Tech women faculty.
How desirable do you feel it is for Virginia
Tech to commit resources to make additional
efforts to . . .
We, too, sent out a questionnaire. The findings
are enough to make a stone cry. Countless
millions all over the face of the earth are accorded
less admiration and respect than they feel they
ought to have. There is no numbering the victims
of injustice, from life’s feast cast out, cruelly
deprived of promotion and pay, and even of selfesteem. Whole legions are liked, hut not well
liked, and the endeavors of vast multitudes are nor
sufficiently appreciated. And everywhere, in each
and every land and clime, people are unsatisfied,
their potentials unmaximized, their self-images
unenhanced. Alone in the dark, children weep,
and some people are not entirely pleased with
their personal work situations. What is this old
world coming to? And what can we can we do to
set it right?
Well, obviously, we need to set up a committee,
which can draw up the guidelines for the
establishment of a permanent commission, which
will then formulate policy for the enactment of
legislation, which will create a new department,
which will mandate the existence of agencies and
bureaus and offices, each and every one of which
will send out questionnaires, which will remind
everybody of how much there is to whine about,
and will even offer some helpful hints to those
few who foolishly imagine that they just don’t
have much to whine about. And then we’ll need
just one more little thing: a whole nation of people
who are ignorant and gullible enough to answer
the questionnaires. That part we can leave to the
educationists.
We ordinarily suppose that philosophy doesn’t
count. We deem it not even a luxury toward which
only the few aspire, but rather an aberration, with
which only the few are afflicted.
But philosophy does count, even in the most
practical matters, especially in the most practical
matters. All we have to do to make people
ignorant and gullible is persuade them into a silly
epistemology. Then they can believe that belief is
a way of knowing, that feeling and sentiment are
knowledge, that any opinion is as good as any
other, as long as it’s sincere, of course, and that
such speculations as these are of no practical use
anyway, because, as everyone knows, philosophy
doesn’t count. People in that condition guarantee
the continuance among us of astrologers and
politicians and other pests almost as harmful. Ed.
D. candidates and pollsters would also disappear
if it weren’t for the ready availability of those who
will both offer and accept the uninformed and
unexamined testimony of feelings and opinions.
And so, too, would the makers of “Perceptions
of Sex Equity for Women Faculty at Virginia
Tech.”
The passages cited above are brief introductions
to the sections of that document. Each is followed
by an appropriate list of items to he weighed or
selected or in some other way to be “perceived.”
At the end of the questionnaire, however, there is
one last section without any introduction. It looks
so naked and forlorn. The responder has to answer
these questions without any guidance whatsoever,
without even the least hint as to what answers the
questioners most want. And these are hard
questions, too. Rank and serial number questions,
questions of mere fact, to be answered (by those
who do choose to answer them) for the sake of
mere knowledge.
How refreshing and encouraging it would be to
hear that someone, somewhere, has sent out a
questionnaire asking for knowledge, for the facts,
and for the evidence by which those facts might
be known to anyone, anyone at all, utterly without
regard to anyone’s feelings and perceptions.
It can’t happen here.
One of the most effective illusions of our time is
the belief that our “educational” system is a
branch of our society. In fact, that system is the
root of our society. We are its creatures, and truly,
since the great, central themes of educationism are
devised by agents of government, children of the
state. It was not from silly parents, or venal
hucksters, or from ignorant pals in the streets, that
we learned to prize feeling more than fact, and
that mere knowledge is only the “lowest level of
outcomes,” the first baby step on the long journey
to the land of the affective domain, the realm
ruled by awarenesses and attitudes, where the
entertainers and persuaders flourish and govern,
and where policy and law depend on the counting
of perceptions.
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Of “perceptions,” an educationistic code-word
for “feelings,” there can be no end, and, even
more important, no objective verification. Nor is
there an end of persons who are less than perfectly
happy in every respect. We can understand the
Virginia Tech questionnaire, therefore, as a
pretext for endless employment in soliciting subjective and anonymous testimony as to their
emotions from interested witnesses about whose
skills of thoughtful self-examination and
temperamental propensities the questioner knows,
and seeks to know, nothing.
We call that “research.” And with its help, our
social engineers, instructed by our educationists,
who invented this kind of research by
questionnaire, will, pretty soon now, bring in that
bright new day when you won’t even have to
pursue happiness.
And if you have any perceptions or feelings in
this matter, please try not to mention them where
they can hear.
[VII:2, March 1983]
The Invers Proportin
“...the ability to write well is inversly
proportinate to salary...TV personalites who
daily abuse the rules of grammar get
infinately more than English teachers.”
Those alas, and yet once more, are the words—
absolutely sic—of a schoolteacher whining about
low pay and a bum rap. Why do they do it? They
always end up looking, like the striking teacher
whose placard called for “Descent Wages,”
overpaid and guilty as hell.
And, to look into another academic can of
worms, here is the complete— also sic—text of a
letter to a teacher from someone in the office of
the superintendent of schools in Cook Co.:
Please, show your transcripts to the Personal
dept. and the will advise you on procesure. If,
any further questions please call are office.
Although such examples are often sent directly
to us by readers, these two were sent in more or
less indirectly by readers. The first was cited, with
appropriate comment, in Newsday, in a serious,
thoughtful column by Ilene Barth. The other was
used by Mike Royko (one our favorites, because
he always calls a fool a fool) in a piece in the
Chicago Sun Times.
Barth and Royko, like most newspaper people,
are literate and rational, and, in many matters,
well-informed and realistic. We are grateful to
them for bringing such examples to a readership
that is even larger—but surely not infinately
larger—than ours, and we certainly don’t want
them to stop doing that. But they really ought to
knock off all the deploring.
The trouble with journalists is that they lead
very sheltered lives, never seeing anything more
disgusting and horrible than corruption, rape,
murder, war, and an occasional volcanic eruption.
This is what gives them the amiable but naive
optimism out of which they deem it useful to
deplore the routine and firmly institutionalized
ignorance in the schools.
On the other hand, every member of our
editorial staff has spent an entire lifetime in
school, in the very belly of the beast. We know
there is no hope of reform. In fact, even to put an
end to the letters that incense journalists would
require nothing less than dissolution of the entire
system that we call “public education.”
It is only from a special point of view that
“education” is a failure. As to its own purposes, it
is an unqualified success. One of its purposes is to
serve as a massive tax-supported jobs program for
legions of not especially able or talented people.
As social programs go, it’s a good one. The pay
isn’t high, but the risk is low, the standards are
lenient, entry is easy, and job security is still
pretty good. By contrast with the teacher who
wrote the letter, the uncouth “TV personality” is a
daredevil entrepreneur working at a high altitude
without a net. Should he commit the
televisionistic equivalent of that pathetic letter, he
would end up reading the midnight poultry market
wrap-up in Lower Possum Trot. But nothing will
happen to the teacher.
Regular readers might review our own long list
of characters, all those decent, dull mediocrities,
who work pretty hard to little avail. Pitiably illeducated schoolteachers, and the ludicrous, drab
professors of educationism who ill-educated them.
Principals and superintendents sucked up from the
least academic in a system where the merely
academic is relegated to the most junior. The
camp-followers of every kind, the facilitators,
coordinators, consultants, who have jobs only
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because the system adopts causes and concocts
programs that will seem to serve them. In a well
and truly “reformed” education, what would
happen to such folk? Do we want them out of the
schools and onto the dole?
In fact, the system is perfect, except for one
little detail. We must find a way to get the
children out of it.
[VII:4, May 1983]
The King Canute Commission
If an unfriendly foreign power had
attempted to impose on America the
mediocre educational performance that
exists today, we might well have viewed it
as an act of war.
We have left undone those things which we
ought to have done, and we have done those
things which we ought not to have done, and
there is no health in us.
Reagan was right. The rising tide lifts all the
boats. And the rafts, too. And all of the flotsam
and jetsam, as well, the drifting grapefruit skins
and beer cans, and the rotting bodies of dead
things.
Now, “a rising tide of mediocrity” has just been
detected by some sort of national commission on
something or other about the schools. Gosh, it’s
scary. Even the commission’s report seems, if that
first quotation above is typical, to have been
washed ashore by that very tide. That broken
English about imposing the performance that
exists has an unpleasantly familiar sound. We
suspect that a couple of cagey educationists
wangled slots on that commission and imposed
the performance that exists in the report.
The second quotation is not to be found in the
commission’s report, but it should be. In fact, it
ought to have been the report. It says it all, and in
much better English. And it has this further virtue,
that it speaks in the first person, not of some
hypothetically imposed performance, but of what
we have done and left undone.
In the manner of the typical social studies text,
which is likely to ex plain the Civil War by saying
that “problems arose,” the commission’s report
laments all sorts of bad things that are said to have
“happened” in the schools. The commissioners are
perturbed to notice that courses in physics and
courses in bachelor living carry the same credit,
but hardly the same enrollment, in most schools.
That, as they must know, didn’t just happen.
Persons did it, and they did it by design and out of
policy. And while those persons were doing that,
and perpetrating countless similar outrages, other
persons were standing around leaving undone
those things which they ought to have done. Put
them all together—you get we. And that includes
every member of the commission.
To whom, then, do they speak? To them who
brought us to this, in the fond hope that those
miscreants are now willing to do the only thing
they ever could have done to improve the schools,
which would be to seek some other line of work?
To the idle bystanders, who have known all of this
for years, and who will now suddenly decide to do
their duty and set everything right, an endeavor
that can never succeed until all the bums have
been thrown out?
But there is no whisper in this report of the
bums who must be thrown out if anything is to
change. The sad state of the schools, which the
commission aptly characterizes by its allusion to
courses in bachelor living, is remarkably less sad
for those vast legions of people who make livings
from the fact that the deepest principles of
American educationism do not merely permit but
actually require courses in bachelor living, and
other like travesties beyond counting. Such things
were not smuggled in through the boiler-room in
the dead of night. Commissions, committees,
boards of “education,” all approved them.
Professors of education, who concocted such
courses, commended them, and designed
programs for “teaching” the “teaching” of them.
Legislatures
enacted
them.
Supervisors,
developers, coordinators, facilitators, hastened
into the service of every new empire and began at
once the preparation of grant proposals for more
of the same.
All those people, however some of them may
have profited, were acting on principle, the
explicit principle of American schooling for the
last sixty years or so. It is, briefly and therefore all
too simply, stated, the belief that the purpose of
education is to bring about a certain kind of
society, and that the individual benefits from
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education to the degree in which he is adjusted to
that society. Combine that with educationistic
epistemology in which mere knowledge is “the
lowest level of learning outcomes,”* and you end
up with what we have: the deliberate neglect of
strict disciplines, which are not conducive to the
persuasion and adjustment of students. Those
bachelor living courses and all their siblings are
not nasty growths on an otherwise healthy
organism. They are the heart of the matter, and
they will never go away unless the ideology that
spawns them is specifically repudiated.
There is nothing even close to such a
repudiation in the report. Taking pains to offend
no one, the commission wags its finger in no
discernible direction and never says what most
needs saying: The trash must go! We must stop
doing those things that we ought not to have done
and do only those that we ought to do. The two
cannot live together, for the bad will always drive
out the good.
If it had said such things, however, the report
would not have provided anyone with fresh
ammunition in the Great War for Money. Good
schools, stripped of all rubbish, would cost less
money, but only the students would profit from
such schools.
As only one of the many factions that make up
the vast political entity we call “education,”
students have little clout. But all the other factions
should be delighted by the report. It offers golden
opportunities for academies of educationism,
administrative bureaucracies, teachers’ unions,
purveyors and manufacturers of devices and
materials, even guidance counselors and changeagents.
Well, maybe they just did the best they could.
We can hardly expect to achieve “excellence”
without a little compromise, can we? And when
“the best,” the champions of excellence who lack
all conviction, are sent out to do battle with “the
worst,” those thrusters and adjusters who are filled
with passionate intensity, what else would they do
but cut a deal? You wouldn’t want anyone to get
hurt in a squabble over excellence, would you?
[VII:3, April 1983]
See “The Master of Those Who Know,” (VII, I; Feb;
83), for a consideration of the epistemology of
educationism.
*
VI
Mangled Language
(Elementary Division)
Sticht in the Eye Again
THE first thing you must learn, if you want to
become a professional of education and earn big
money from the taxpayers, is how to dream up
cunning definitions for things that need no
defining. As dull and stupid as that may seem, we
urge you to persevere in its practice, for it is also
the last thing you will have to learn. Many a
splendid career in education has been built on
nothing more than that one little skill, endlessly
elaborated.
Of course, if you want formal training as a
professional, we can only suggest that you keep
checking the ads in match-book covers, but, if
you’re reasonably bright and willing to practice,
you might be able to master this lucrative
discipline/field/area in the privacy of your home.
Here’s how it works: If you persist in saying, for
instance, that speaking is speaking, you can only
be an unprofessional elitist. Your real professional
says that speaking is “uttering in order to
language.” And what is uttering? Uttering is the
“production of vocal sounds; i.e., sounds
produced using the larynx and oral cavities.”
Needless definitions are the natural breeding
ground of silly neologisms. If you can come up
with “to language,” you can define that and sound
even more professional. To language is
“representation of conceptualizations by properly
ordered sequences of signs; or the inverse process
of
understanding
the
conceptualizations
underlying . . . sequences of signs produced by
others.” Now you trot out “auding,” “listening to
speech in order to language,” provided, of course,
that you have already defined listening as
“selecting and attending to excitation in the
auditory modality.”
It’s hard to believe that one educationist could
do all that (and lots more) out of his own head, so
we’re guessing that Tom Sticht of the National
Institute of Education spent plenty of time
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consulting what they call “the literature,” a
compendium of the inanities of other
educationists. Sticht has bunched much such stuff
into “The Basic Skills: A Frame of Reference,” a
“background paper” written at the behest of U.S.
Commissioner of Education Ernest L. Boyer.
Since you paid for the thing, Boyer will
cheerfully send you a copy. (He’s at 400
Maryland Ave. SW, Washington, DC 20202. Tell
him we sent you.) When you read it, you’ll be
delighted to find that Sticht has selected and
attended to excitation not only in the literacy
modality but in the “oracy” and the “numeracy”
modalities as well. You’ll learn about the
improvement of affiliations among linkages, and
you’ll meet the amazing BAPS [Basic Adaptive
Processes] that go by the names of Hearing,
Seeing, Motor Movement, and Cognitive. (Yes, he
does think of Cognitive as a noun.)
If a man came to your door trying to peddle that
kind of stuff, just how long would you aud his
languaging before sneaking off to the telephone to
call the wagon? If he told you that he had it in
mind to do something or other to your children,
something designed to affect their oracy, would it
not seem good to you to provide him with a BAP
in the oral cavities? Academic questions, to be
sure. In fact, you bought all of this stuff long, long
ago, and, although you have paid and paid, you
will never be done with paying. Long, long ago,
you gave your children to the peddlers to do with
as they pleased. Now that the children are more
ignorant than ever, you turn, naturally, to
government, which turns, naturally, back to the
peddlers.
The Pavians, having given half their wealth to
the Visigoths to defend their city against the
Ostrogoths, and the remaining half to the
Ostrogoths for like service against the Visigoths,
found that they could no longer afford to live
there, except, of course, as servants to the newly
rich barbarians, all of whom turned out to be
related.
[III:3, March 1979]
Eric Smeac’s Practice-related
Information Domain
THERE
is something or other called
ERIC/SMEAC.* It is harbored by the Ohio State
University at 1200 Chambers Road, Columbus,
Ohio 43212. ERIC/SMEAC sends out, or emits,
we might say, an impenetrable annual newsletter,
of which we have the issue of December 1978. It
suggests (but who can be sure?) that this outfit is
in the business of telling teachers (here called
“educators”) all about nifty new gimmicks and
boldly innovative thrusts in the teaching of
science and math and the pop pseudoscience,
Environmental Education.† E/S is not at all
ashamed to admit that it published From Ought to
Action in Environmental Education.‡ Nor does it
seek to deny its interest in some things it calls
“information products” or that “a major effort of
the clearinghouse is the production of a variety of
information
analysis
products.”
The
manufacturers of gadgets and kits and “packets of
materials” love ERIC/SMEAC.•
All of that we learn from Robert W. Howe, but
other hands that might better have rested idle have
also found work in this sheet. One of them tells us
all about “the challenge confronting schools and
colleges created by emerging energy realities.”
(Misplaced modifiers we can handle, but the
thought of an emerging energy reality is just too
scary. It could even be Godzilla.) The same hand
calls teachers the “education clientele” and brings
us word of “the development of adaption
identification.” Next we hear of “the Center’s
functional activities,” a nasty thought, which
About ERIC we can’t even guess. We do find this:
“Clearinghouse for Science, Mathematics and
Environmental Education.” That’s CSMEE. Maybe
there really is an Eric Smeac, and this is just a part of
his fiendish scheme to turn our brains into tapioca.
†
Everyone has heard that those who can, do, and those
who can’t, teach. The adage says nothing about those
who can neither do nor teach. For them, lest they
vanish utterly from the public payroll, we devise noncourses usually called “educations.”
‡
This should be a dilly. It’ll cost you three bucks, but it
might be the funniest book of the year.
•
To those professionals of education who’ve heard tell
of Newton, it’s a mystery how in hell that man learned
all that Physics and Math Education without so much
as a remote-control film-strip projector.
*
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include “maintaining access to a core [that’s what
it says: core] of personnel . . . so that
programmatic aspects of the program thrust is
appropriately coordinated.” Well, those who are
busy with important stuff like the appropriate
coordination of the programmatic aspects of a
program thrust certainly can’t be bothered about
trivia like appropriate coordination of plural
subjects and plural verbs.
Worse is in store. This SMEACer speaks also of
“new
energy
conservation
supplemental
curriculum
materials
focusing
on
the
interrelationship of Energy, Environment, and
Engagement.” In educationistic prose, it is not a
surprise when materials focus, but that stupendous
noun pileup will call forth awe and envy in all
professionals of education. That last bit,
furthermore, is not entirely without wisdom, for
many will surely testify to the curiously amiable
interrelationship of energy, environment, and
engagement, or something like it, at least.
At E/S they do things not when asked but “on a
request basis.” They promote phases, and one of
their activities has conjured an effort. They do
even better when they write about some
bureaucratic boondoggle called the National
Education Practice File.
This “practice file” (their quotation marks) has
“generated a variety of ‘ideas’ [ditto] within the
practice-related information domain.” (They do
love a domain.)* And how were these “ideas”
generated? They “were generated through group
and individual contact with a variety of
educators.” Educators have principles, you know.
They will never, for instance, do anything except
as individuals or as groups. And they love contact,
but again only with individuals or groups.
This Newsletter reports that one Patricia
Blosser, a SMEACer, went before a regional
meeting of the NSTA. (That could stand for
National Science Teachers’ Association, but they
probably wouldn’t use the apostrophe.) There she
presented a paper on “reading as a survival skill.”
We’d admire to have heard that. If the SMEACers
know as much about reading as they do about
writing, which seems inevitable, and if that paper
*
Domain is one of the darlingest weasel-words of the
professionals. It sounds so noble. They need it, as they
need area, field, and sphere, because we all giggle
when they claim to know something about a subject.
was written no better than the rest of their stuff,
reading it to an educated audience would have led
to a demonstration of running like hell as a
survival skill. The Newsletter, however, does not
suggest that Blosser barely escaped with her life,
and that tells us something about those science
teachers.
Of course, we could have guessed it from the
Newsletter. No one who cares about skill and
accuracy could ever have written such shabby
trash, and no one committed to disciplined
intelligence could bear to read it. That the
SMEACers do write it, and that science teachers
do bear it, should disabuse us of the quaint notion
that our science teachers have been trained in
science.
No more would the math teachers seem to have
been trained in mathematics, except, presumably,
in the way that the teachers of Environmental
Education are trained in environment, probably by
hearing all about its importance often enough so
that they reach a state of what the teacher-trainers
would call enhanced environment awareness.
Math and science have it in common that they are,
before all else, habits of mind, and that they can
find expression only in clear, conventionally
correct utterance. Those incapable of such
utterance cannot be teachers.
Well, who cares? With a little help from a core
of personnel and a few file “ideas” from the
practice-related domain, they can be educators.
That’s already a better job. Not too much work,
automatic membership in a nifty education
clientele, and no lifting.
[III:4, April 1979]
A Brief Note
WE wondered how all those math and science
“educators,” presumably well trained in the skill
of logic and the habit of accuracy, could bear to
read the silly gabble in the ERIC/SMEAC
newsletter. Now we know, for we’ve seen the
work of Marlow Ediger, an actual math educator
at Northeast Missouri State University. He warns,
in Wisconsin Teacher of Mathematics (XXXI: 1,
18), that “the individual learner and society [will]
ultimately reap consequential results.” Like other
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educationists who refer to the subjects they don’t
teach in evasive euphemisms like “sphere,”
“field,” and “area,” Ediger speaks of “the
mathematics arena.”
If the editor of WTM isn’t permanently out to
lunch, then he’s one hell of a great agent
provocateur boring from within. Here’s how he
lets Ediger find enough rope:
Problematic situations must be life-like and real.
Thus, relevant problems to be solved in the
school-class setting must also have transfer
values to societal settings. The mathematics
curriculum then must not be separated from that
deemed vital and relevant in society. If, for
example, a classroom needs carpeting in the
school setting, pupils with teacher guidance may
determine the number of square feet or square
yards needed. Metric measurements may also be
utilized! Comparisons can be made for costs of
diverse carpets from competing stores carrying
the needed merchandise. Pupils in this situation
are involved in identifying and solving a
problem which integrates the goals of school
and society. What is learned in the school-class
setting is definitely useful in the larger society
arena.
So much for the habit of accuracy and the skill
of logic among math educators. Do you suppose
there is, in mathematics, some flaw in procedure
equivalent to redundancy? Is there some way, in
an equation, to say that things are definitely equal?
Is that weird exclamation point in fact a factorial
sign? Is utilized to used as y′ is to y, and the
school-class setting some power of the school
setting, itself some power of a mere school? Will
multiplication cease in Missouri when all the
classrooms are carpeted, or will the math
educators, in some boldly innovative thrust,
discover new problematic situations in the
broomclosets?
Well, let’s not be too hard on Ediger; maybe he
just knows his audience. After all, he’s
remarkably specific about “stores carrying the
needed merchandise,” lest the hapless math
educators go wandering into haberdasheries and
bakeries asking about diverse carpets.
[III:5, May 1979]
Spinach
WE
have been reluctant to take an editorial
position on the vexatious question of sexism in
language. It is true that language is both a display
and a generator of attitudes and values, and that
certain conventional devices of our language do
suggest that our species is made up of men and
special cases. (This suggestion is even more
emphatic in languages that show gender in plural
pronouns, so that the addition of one little boy to a
band of a thousand Amazon marauders turns the
whole pack into a masculine “they.”) It is just as
true, however, that most proposed remedies have
been either illogical, ugly, or silly, and sometimes
all three. What to do?
Now to our aid comes a faithful reader who has
sent us the June 1980 issue of The WS Quarterly,
a flacksheet all about the WallingfordSwarthmore School District in Walingford,
Pennsylvania. The only article in the issue is
“Grade Repetition..............” (Those fourteen dots
are sic; maybe they’re symbolic?) The piece is
said, perhaps with exceptionally fine editorial
discrimination, to have been “prepared” by one
Rose Alex, a “reading specialist” at large in the
Wallingford Elementary School.
Rose Alex is a preparing specialist too. She has
prepared her article in the form of a hypothetical
(let’s hope) conversation between a bewildered
and remarkably unobservant parent and a
confident, patient, knowledgeable reading
specialist—a real pro. The pitiful parent asks
questions like this:
My child’s teacher has suggested that he/she not
go on to the next grade this coming year, but
repeat the grade. How can I be sure that
repeating the grade is the best thing for my
child?
Rose Alex replies, in part:
To try to make a child believe he/she is
achieving by giving him/her tasks at a slower
pace does not fool him/her when he/she sees
his/her peers moving ahead of him/her.
That does it. We’re ready to take a stand. We
say it’s spinach, and we say the hell with it.
[IV:7, October 1980]
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The Lady with the Lump
I can stand out the war with any man.
Nightingale Clobbered! Sings no More
Intentionality of Consciousness
Reported in Family Ecosystem
JUST when we thought we had it all figured out,
just as we had definitely concluded that women
would never indulge themselves in the ludicrous
linguistic posturing so natural to men, we got
some bad news from Akron. It came in these very
words, and we are afraid that they may have been
written by a woman:
Assumptions from theories of ecology and
phenomenology
provide
an
ecologicalphenomenological perspective. The ecologicalphenomenological perspective provides the
framework for graduate education to prepare
family health nurses to assist families in
sustaining that quality of life which enables
them to survive and prevail. From an
ecological-phenomenological* perspective the
faculty views families within a macroecosystem, a meta-ecosystem, and a microecosystem; and perceives the phenomena of the
family ecosystem in terms of the intentionality
of consciousness of enfamilied selves as
reported by family members.
being, antithesis of doing and synthesis of
becoming.”
Heavy.
If all this puts you in mind of one of those real
intellectual institution places where they figure the
ontological is-ness of It All, it’s only because
you’ve forgotten—and who can blame you?—the
key word in the cited passage: “nurse.”
Yes, this is all about how they “teach” nurses
something or other at the College of Nursing at
the University of Akron.
Florence Nightingale said that she could stand
the war, and she did. She also said:
No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other
definition of what a nurse should be than this—
“devoted and obedient.” This definition would
do just as well for a porter. It might even do for
a horse.
Somehow, we don’t think it cheers her to know
that the women who are defining the nurse are so
docile and obedient that they even want to talk
like men, which no self-respecting horse would
dream of.
[VI:5, May 1982]
VII
And there’s more, lots more. And it’s all the
same, of course, except when it’s worse. That
“intentionality,” for example, is later defined—
well, not defined, but at least viewed—“viewed as
those motives and goals that lead to expansions of
consciousness.” And consciousness “is viewed as
five domains of living: valuing, thinking, feeling,
acting, and intuiting.”
Now you might suspect that when
intentionality does lead to expansion of
consciousness, it might, at least, open up a couple
of new domains, loafing about and woolgathering, perhaps, but no. It turns out that
“expansion of consciousness is viewed as a
dialectical process which encompasses thesis of
*
This is the kind of spacing you have to expect if you
use ‘words’ of 27 characters.
Quis Custodiet…
A Big “A” for Effort
The essential factor that keeps the scientific
enterprise healthy is a shared respect for
quality. Everybody can take pride in the
quality of his own work, and we expect
rough treatment from our colleagues
whenever we produce something shoddy.
[The words of Freeman Dyson, a physicist,
in The New Yorker for August 6, 1979, page
40.]
WELL, sure, but let’s be reasonable. There are,
after all, enterprises in which rough treatment for
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shoddy work would be downright churlish. When
your kids come home from camp, do you tell them
that their pots are lumpy and leaky and their
popsicle-stick pencil-holders all askew? Do you
inform that sweet old lady who plays the
harmonium at choir practice that her rhythm is
uncertain and her accidentals accidental and that
she’d do better playing on a touch-tone telephone?
And how about that tap-dancing at the junior high
talent show, and the mimeographed newsletter
your Aunt Tabiatha emits every Christmas?
Now, if you’ll just give such things a little
humanistic thought, maybe you can enhance your
values on a holistic basis in the good old affective
domain. Then, when your neighborhood principal
sends out a page of ungrammatical babble, maybe
you’ll be sensitive enough to give him as much
consideration as you give the baton twirlers in the
homecoming parade. It’s honest effort that counts,
isn’t it, and that principal is doing the best he can.
Those of us who have landed steady jobs in the
schools understand these things, and we always
give each other A for effort, and never, never, any
of that rough treatment stuff. When our colleagues
undertake a modification of the sequencing of
modules within clusters exposing students to a
variety of experiences including module
instruction in basic skills, do we mutter about a
shared respect for quality? We do not. We know
that that’s the best they can do, and we give them
A for effort. When the guy down the hall is
teaching intercultural sensitivity enhancement
through sampling the foods of many lands, do we
fret about some utterly hypothetical distinction
between academic study and those swell selfenrichment courses at the Y on Thursday nights?
We do not. It’s a shared respect for academic
freedom that keeps this enterprise healthy, and if
we find blintzes better than bibliographies and
pizzas more to be prized than papers, that’s
academic freedom and none of your damn
business, or any elitist physicist’s either.
Physicists, you must realize, are unlikely to
share those humanistic values inherent in things
like experiential curriculum development and the
making of collages from scraps of uncooked
pasta. They have little appreciation of the
noncognitive aspects, phases, and factors of
observation-participation-involvement
and
painting on velvet.
So let’s just restrict that “rough treatment” stuff
to the physicists, OK? After all, those birds are
dangerous. What they do might even have
consequences, for God’s sake!
[III:7, October 1979]
The Principal and the Interest
INSTITUTIONS feel no pain. Only people can
feel the relentless pain of illiteracy, the desperate
bafflement of a mind unskilled in the ways of
logic and thoughtful attention, and dimly aware,
but aware nevertheless, of its own confusion.
Schools do not have minds; they have guidelines.
Their guidelines run, when it isn’t too
inconvenient, as far as what they are not at all
ashamed to call the parameters of basic minimum
competency. Basic minimum competence (why do
they need that y?) is not literacy. It is, however,
just enough a counterfeit literacy to convince the
minimally competent to fancy themselves literate,
except, of course, for those moments of desperate
pain.
And there is even worse in store for the pseudoliterate victim of the schools. As bad as it is, selfknowledge is better than public exposure.
Imagine, if you can, the pain of a certain high
school principal who now finds himself publicly
humiliated and accused of incompetence because
of an article he wrote, so innocently, for the
school paper. Here are some excerpts:
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The County office has coordinators in all areas
that is willing to help when help is needed.
Every one who participated are to be
commended for a job well done. We did not win
as many senior games as we would have like
too, but both teams showed excellent
sportsmanship.
The Senior High band and the Junior High band
were always there at the ----- stadium when we
need them. The Cheerleaders cheered the Drill
Team performaned. The motivation and the
momentous was there. It worked as clock word
or a puzzle each part fell in place at the right
time. If you were at the statiurn with me. I am
sure you would have been satisfied with the
performance.
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The article also displayed some startling spelling
errors, such as “surch” for “search” and even
“intonative” for “innovative,” and if there exists
an educationist who can spell correctly only one
word, the odds are seven to one that that word will
be “innovative.”
A dismayed parent, doing exactly what we have
often urged, sent a copy of the principal’s article,
with appropriate commentary, to a local paper,
and irate citizens petitioned the school board to
remove the principal for incompetence. The
superintendent said that he would “handle the
matter as a personnel problem rather than in
public.” The resolution, if any, we do not know.
The principal further injured himself with
defenses so pathetically irrelevant or implausible
as to suggest even greater incompetence. He
claimed that the piece was a hastily written rough
draft, and that he expected that someone on the
school paper would “edit” it. His errors, however,
are characteristic not of haste but of ignorance;
and few parents could have been consoled by his
implicit admission that students on the school
paper had higher standards, and would do their
assignments more conscientiously, than the
principal. The poor man put forth as evidence
some other pieces he had written for the same
paper, pieces in which his competence was
demonstrated by “few errors” rather than many.
He pointed out, as though the conventions of
spelling, punctuation, and syntax appropriate to
English prose were different from English prose
in newspapers, that the education of principals
does not require courses in journalism. And, most
astonishingly of all, he further excused himself by
telling the parents who had entrusted to him the
intellectual instruction of their children that he
was, after all, “an inexperienced writer.”
An inexperienced writer. The man is a graduate
of a small college, probably with a degree in
education. He has a master’s degree, probably in
educational administration, from a state
university. Can these distinctions, such as they
are, be attained by an inexperienced writer? Did
he write papers? A master’s thesis? Did his
teachers find no fault in his writing, or in his
scholarship, which they could not possibly have
assessed without reading what he had written?
And that school board that made him a principal
and that now faces a nasty “personnel problem”
too delicate to be “handled” in public, did it
consider
his
academic
and
intellectual
achievements? How did it measure them? Was
that principal never a teacher? What could he have
taught, who is so meagerly practiced in literacy?
Regular readers will have noticed that contrary
to our usual practice we have not given the
principal’s name, or even the name of that
stadium. We don’t want you to care who he is,
because this case is nastily vexed by the fact that
he is black, and that the parents who seek his
removal are white.
In one way, that is irrelevant. The academic and
intellectual distinctions appropriate to a school
principal are whatever they are, for principals of
any color. And if such distinctions are not
required of principals, which is generally the case,
illiteracy and ignorance are no more to be
accounted demerits in black principals than in the
thousands of talentless gym and shop teachers
who have wangled their ways through guidance
counsellorship and curriculum facilitation to
become white principals.
In other ways, however, this hapless principal’s
color is all too relevant. It permits him to claim, as
he does, and perhaps even to believe, that the
charges against him arise from racial hostility.
And he may be right, which is not to say that the
charges are groundless but only that hosts of white
principals who deserve similar discomfiture
remain unindicted. We’re on the principal’s side;
we favor equal exposure and humiliation for all
the ignoramuses who have been awarded, by
virtue of silly degrees from academies of
educationism, undemanding employment in the
public school jobs program.
But we are not on his side when he says that
“there are more people interested in the education
of students than in this petty kind of bias.” The
blackness of the principal and the whiteness of his
opponents are, for some purposes, not to the point,
but the redness of that herring cannot be ignored.
It is precisely in the cause of “the education of
students” that we must object to academic
deficiencies in principals of any color whatsoever.
Furthermore, the principal’s pathetic ploy makes
us wonder: What notion of “education” does he
harbor, in which the elementary mechanical skills
of literacy are of so little importance? And, even
worse, if he in fact believes that the ignorance of
an inexperienced writer is being condemned only
because the writer happens to be black, would he
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prefer that it be excused only because the writer is
black?
No, the poor man simply has no legitimate
defense. But he does have a legitimate complaint.
Since he seems unlikely to think of it, and since
almost all the rest of us can legitimately make the
same complaint, we are going to make it.
That principal is suffering. The students, and
their parents, are suffering. The whole town is
suffering, and so is a whole nation, where fewer
and fewer of those who call themselves
“educators” have attained even the once standard
level of mediocrity. But some people are not
suffering. The teachers who handed that principal
his high school diploma without having taught
him even such simple things as spelling and
punctuation (what else did they neglect?), they are
not suffering. And the professors who took their
pay from his tuition and gave him passing grades
and a college degree and sent him forth as a
certified educator and wrote warm letters of
recommendation to graduate schools, all without
knowing, or caring, that he was “an inexperienced
writer” who couldn’t even spell or punctuate
correctly, they are not suffering. And the
educationists who welcomed him (and his money)
into the high calling of scholarship and
pronounced him a “master” and in every way fit
mentor of youth and who testified to his
intellectual prowess and consummate learning to
an unwary (and now unhappy) school board, they
are not suffering.
The principal thinks himself educated. And why
not? All those people told him that he was
educated, and they gave him the papers to prove
it. So what else can he believe now but that his
troubles are the result of racial discrimination?
And he may still be right.
Did all of those culprits pass him along because
they didn’t know his weakness? Bad. Because
they didn’t care? Worse. Or did they presume that
his race would probably make superior intellectual
achievement unlikely and would also protect him
from the consequences of its absence? The worst.
Beyond these three unsavory hypotheses, we just
can’t imagine any others.
[V:3, March 1981]
The Interest and the Principle
FROM time to time we find ourselves wondering
why our traditional victims, almost always people
with jobs in the school business and therefore at
least mindful of the importance of education,
write such terrible English. The obvious
explanation just doesn’t go far enough. While it is
easy to see that they are poorly educated and often
not very bright to begin with, that still leaves us to
wonder why such people went into the school
business at all, why the school business so readily
accepted and nourished them, and why so little of
the presumable influence of the intellectual life
seems to have rubbed off on them. Now, thanks to
George Orwell, we have a better explanation.
Consider first a few words from one William
Paton,
Superintendent
of
Schools
in
Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, in Forward, a fat
pamphlet
of
education
blather
about
“gifted/talented education” put out by the
Wisconsin Association for Supervision and
Curriculum Development. Paton, who laments “a
dirth” of suitable teachers and hopes that someone
will “give voice on a statewide basis,” writes like
this:
It is readily apparent that the major issue facing
those of us concerned in this area deals with the
question of how we shall provide equal and
quality programming opportunities which
respond to the needs of all children.
So. The merely apparent seems to be invisible to
educationists, perhaps because they are always
concerned in an area; they have to wait for the
readily apparent. And the issue (major, naturally)
deals with the question, the question of how. And
what, exactly, are programming opportunities?
Programs? Courses? Field trips? Or are they some
improbable opportunities for the children to
program some quality into an educational system
run by grown-ups who can’t make sense?
Well, who cares? Wait. Here’s a better question.
Who doesn’t care? That we can answer. William
Paton doesn’t care. He’s written his piece and
probably listed it on his vita as a “scholarly
publication,” so why should he care that it makes
no sense to say that the issue deals with the
question? Big deal. And, while it is hard to
believe that anyone except a penniless old mother
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would read an educationist’s “scholarly
publication,” those others of Paton’s ilk for whom
the piece was intended won’t care either. How can
they? They are themselves quite concerned in
areas where issues deal with questions.
In the essay “Politics and the English
Language,” his fullest exploration of the
inevitable influences of thought and language
upon one another, Orwell shows us how to
understand why the Patons of Academe do what
they do.* He speaks of the writer who is unable to
say what he means, the writer who inadvertently
says what he does not mean, and the writer who,
improbable as it seems, is not interested in what
he is saying and who is therefore indifferent as to
what he might mean. The first two suffer merely
from incapacity, but it is that very incapacity that
is engendered and sustained by the indifference of
the third. The babblers of educationism write and
think badly because they are not interested in
education.
Can you detect in Paton’s prose some
impassioned concern for the intellectual nurture of
those “gifted/talented” students, who are probably
far more attentive and thoughtful than the
bureaucrat who presumes to superintend them?
Was it out of deep commitment to the value of
clarity and precision in the work of the mind that
Paton found the issue that deals with the question
of how quite good enough for his purposes? What
practiced discipline of the intellect, what love of
learning, can we suppose in a man who will not
even lift his pen a moment to consider what he
means by “quality programming opportunities”?
And if these are “little” things, shall we conclude
from them that this busy superintendent will
nevertheless give his powers of attentive
thoughtfulness and meticulous workmanship to
his superintendence of the big things—like
education?
How can it be that people choose to spend their
lives in a calling that interests them so little that
they won’t trouble themselves to make sense
when thinking about it? Adam Smith answered
that question long ago:
It is the interest of every man to live as much at
his ease as he can; and if his emoluments are to
be precisely the same, whether he does, or does
not perform some very laborious duty, it is
certainly his interest, at least as interest is
vulgarly understood, either to neglect it
altogether, or, if he is subject to some authority
which will not suffer him to do this, to perform
it in as careless and slovenly a manner as that
authority will permit.
Where there is an inward commitment to the
worth of knowledge and reason—not only
because they are useful, but because they are
good—the authority of principle is enough to
ensure both the interest and the good
workmanship that lead to clarity and precision,
and even to grace, in statement. But the typical
training of an educationist, which often begins
with a skimpy C minus undergraduate major and
peters out with a “doctorate” in education, the
highest rung on the ladder of social promotion,
seems neither to require nor to foster such a
commitment. If it did, they would not, they could
not, write their habitual, inane gibberish.
And, as they lack the inward authority of
principle, they lack also the supervision of
outward authority. They have jobs in agencies of
government, where people may sometimes be
held accountable for some things, tardiness,
perhaps, but never, never, for the quality of the
work of their minds. In the entire, tremendous
apparatus of public education, there is no one who
will say, “Look here, Paton. This just won’t do!
Surely, the high calling that you have chosen, and
which has, by the way, rewarded you rather
handsomely, especially considering that with the
devotion and ability that this stuff suggests you’d
never be superintendent of anything in an outfit
that had to show a profit, deserves more
thoughtful attention and—yes, dammit!—respect
than you have given it!”
But they have principals, not principles, in the
public schools. So the legions of Patons will go on
forever, securely enjobbed among the likeunminded, impervious to intellectual discipline,
which isn’t in their job descriptions, serving what
does not interest them but is much in their interest,
at least as interest is vulgarly understood.
[V:4, April 1981]
*
This is an Orwell Memorial Issue. You will find more
about this much neglected essay in the next article.
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...And furthermore
The Great Iacono Flap
HERE’s
another superintendent of schools,
Richard C. Hamilton, Ed. D., who superintends
the love of learning and the growth of intellectual
power among the youth of North Hampton, New
Hampshire. He is a man, as the educationists say,
very giving of self, and perfectly willing to lighten
the darkness of grown-ups too, as he does in his
latest annual report:
A new phrase has caught my ear and I would
like to use it in discussing you, your children,
and the ensuing relationship. The phrase is
“centering down.” “Centering down” to me
means a placing of one’s interest in a central
focus, a separating of the important and the not
so important, mentally reducing things to a
discernible entity.
Well, the darndest things will catch the ear in a
cold climate, but this one sounds really neat.
Come on now, haven’t you always wanted to
reduce things to a discernible entity and all that
other good stuff? And how about the meaning and
purpose of life? That interest you any?
It has come to my attention that the
announcement that I conveyed via the
intercom the day following the Chester
High-St. James basketball game which I
disapproved of the loss. It was inferred,
unfortunately, that I placed the reproach
upon my coach. I wish to rectify that
immediately.
CAN our schools ever hope to rise above their
own principals? It seems unlikely. Consider for
instance a certain A. N. Iacono, whose words,
conveyed in this case via bulletin on December
12, 1980, you have just read. Iacono—Oops! We
should have said Doctor Iacono. University of
Pennsylvania, ya know. Fine old ivy league
school. Real high standards. OK. Doctor Iacono is
the principal of Chester High School in Chester,
Pennsylvania. Here’s the rest of his bulletin:
First, I had apologized to Mr. Wilson in the
presence of Mr. White, Athletic Director, after
the announcement for my error for which I
maintain my innocence. Second, the following
day, I made another announcement personally to
Mr. Wilson explaining and apologizing for my
actions. Third, I apologized to Mr. Wilson in the
presence of Mr. Zyckowicz because of a
grievance which was lodged. Fourth, I am
apologizing to the faculty via my own volition
and by no method a prompting from anyone
because of those receivers of my announcement
that perceived it as unprofessional.
I adhere to the dictum that professionalism
must be maintained at all costs, and by no
means would I thrust any aspect of our
profession which may be construed as negative.
For the latter I abjectly apologize. However, I
will continue to maintain my stance that I
appreciate winning, and I want to be part of a
winning team. This is by no means a reflection
upon any individual but rather an indictment of
my personality.
To “center down” in regard to our children is to
me a putting into focus what we are here for.
Well, sure you want to learn to center down,
and of course it’s hard. It’s positively
philosophical. But don’t you worry, bless your
heart. You’re going to have the unmitigated help
of Richard C. Hamilton, Ed. D., and he’s a
professional educator who knows how to explain
very complicated things even to the likes of you
so that you can understand them right in the
comfort of your own home! Ready? He-e-e-e-re
he goes!
Have you “centered down” by climbing into a
tent formed by the kitchen chairs and a blanket?
Have you “centered down” by agreeing to put
up with what goes with a puppy?
Now you get out there and center down and
BOOGIE!
[V:4, April 1981]
Yes. Well, we do agree, although we would
prefer not to stick to a dictum, that
“professionalism” should be maintained,”
whatever that means. However, we find it hard to
figure out exactly what profession it is of which
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Doctor Iacono will so prudently thrust by no
means (or method) any aspect which may be
construed as negative. Doctor Iacono signs
himself “Principal,” but the quality of his prose,
which he apparently does not disapprove of the
loss, suggests something less than the academic
and intellectual excellence that we might have
expected of a learned Doctor and leader of youth
in the ways of the life of the mind. In fact, if the
basketball players of Chester High School can
dribble and pass with twice the grace and
precision, and love of excellence, with which their
principal plays his little game, it’s going to be one
hell of a long season.
In spite of his lofty Far be it from me, and
precisely because of incompetence in language,
the medium of thought, the hapless Doctor Iacono
does manage to thrust some aspects of his
“profession” that must be “construed as negative.”
His solecisms and gaucheries are outward and
visible signs of certain inward and ideological
aspects,* the very aspects that have foisted upon
us schools whose chief academic officers† just can
make sense—neither via intercom nor volition.
Buried in that ludicrous prose is the far from
ludicrous belief that incompetence, which counts
in sport, doesn’t count in the mind. Doctor
Iacono, an educationist who knows that selfesteem is far more important than mere accuracy
and precision, blithely refers to his evidently
garbled and thoughtless announcement as “my
error for which I maintain my innocence”!
Farther down, there is even a hint that the
“error” may have been no such thing at all. Doctor
Iacono does make it clear that if there had been
any “prompting” it would have been “because of
those receivers of [his] announcement that
perceived it as unprofessional.” So there.
*
Educationistic readers will find all this easier to
understand by reminding themselves that an aspect
might just as well be a facet. Or a factor. Or a
component. Or whatever.
†
But it may be that principals don’t think of
themselves as “academic” officers. A recent Bulletin of
the Council for Basic Education quoted some school
superintendent who apparently could see no irony at all
in proclaiming himself “a leader in education except
for curriculum.” Those who automatically equate the
money that is spent on the schools with “funding for
education” would do well to consider the implications
of those words.
And there, in miniature, is the guiding ideology
of educationism, an anti-intellectual, no-fault
relativism, where it just wouldn’t be fair if mere
errors had consequences, and where the meaning
of facts and events is not the object of thoughtful
inquiry but rather a sentiment that some receivers
may perceive. It is only through consistent
application of such principles that we get such
principals, who can neither dribble nor pass on
paper, but who will thrust no negative aspects and
will bravely maintain their stances that they
appreciate winning.
[V:6, September 1981]
Sheer Doctoral Competence
High Order Acquisition Testimony to
High-standard Endeavor where
Seminars Plumb Assists
Awesomeness Partially Comprehended in Texas
YES, it’s true. Only in Texas could it happen,
and only Nolan Estes could have brought it off. It
was Estes, as superintendent of schools in Dallas,
who put an end to busing. With a single flap of his
nimble tongue, he sent the children to school in
motorized attendance modules. So we just knew
that if there was any educationist who might
partially comprehend the awesomeness of
superintending, it would have to be good ol’
Nolan.
He says so himself, in a real fine article we
found in Texas School Business. (You won’t find
a sprightlier journal of thrusts from out on the
cutting edge of the fast lane than good ol’ TSB.)
Estes’ article, co-authored by one L. D. Haskew,
who doesn’t seem to have made any difference, is
called “The Cooperative Superintendcy Program,”
but maybe that’s a typo. It’s really about some
great superintendency program that Estes is
running at the University of Texas, where he has
become a “Professor” and also an “Education
Administrator,” or maybe just a plain “Professor
Education Administrator.” From the way it’s
printed, it’s hard to tell. Anyway, it’s a swell job
for an experienced flapper of tongue. Consider
this:
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Doctoral courses in Educational Administration
focus on high-level superintending attainments
(e. g. planmaking as well as upon intellectual
development (e. g. organization strategy for
Instruction) and sheer doctoral competence (e.
g. research design, rational thinking). Seminars,
called “Leadership Clinics,” plumb the
technological assists to constructive leaderly
superintending. Dissertation design and
publication are high-standard endeavors which
also focus on a chosen facet of superintending’s
broad concerns. Flexibility in the hourly
schedules
for
TEA
work-assignment
performance
enhances
competencedevelopment by course engagements. The
Fellows emerge with a University of Texas
Ph.D. degree as testimony to high order
professional and scholarly acquisitions.
How’s that for sheer doctoral competence in
high-standard endeavor?
It is entertaining, of course, to think of
plumbing the assists and enhancing that
“competence-development”
by
“course
engagements.” And we could provide you a titter
by prowling through the piece and telling you that
the elements abound with training, that
performances will be factored into competencies,
that far upness must escalate, and that there
should be plenty of relational constructiveness
with workmates. It might be fun to hear that when
Estes and Haskew say “Artifacts from
administrative/developmental performance,” they
don’t mean, as one who knows both the meaning
of “artifact” and the nature of educationistic
labors might suppose, dried up ball-points,
æroplanes folded from memos, and paperclips
malformed into projectiles. E. and H. mean,
however, “newspaper clippings, citations or
awards, pointed [?] letters of commendation,
employee evaluation sheets.” Or we might
consider superintending itself, myriad in its
demands, they say, and test whether we too—so
naive that we can’t even understand why people
who want a Leadership Clinic don’t just go and
have one, instead of setting up a seminar and then
calling it a Leadership Clinic—test whether we
can hope to comprehend partially the
awesomeness of superintending.
But this, unlike the esoteric TSB, is a humble
little journal of simple ideas. It’s as much as we
can do to handle the easy stuff. Hyphens, for
instance. Hyphens, in fact, can tell us all we need
to know about sheer doctoral competence (e.g.
rational thinking) in Texas.
These sheer “doctors” of educationism have as
much trouble with little things as with big (e.g.
rational thinking). They are holistic, and can not
waste attention on mere details, unless, of course,
they have to do with expense allowances and
fringe benefits. You must have noticed, in the
cited passage, that the “high-level attainments”
and “high-standard endeavors” suggest the tastes
and habits of some environment other than
Academe. “Now this here’s your easy-clean highstandard chopper-dicer.” But, more to the point,
we are led to wonder about the “acquisitions” at
the end of the paragraph. How come they’re only
“high order” instead of “high-order”? Is there, in
fact, some significant (and intended) distinction
between “high level” and “high-level,” a
distinction that the authors judiciously chose not
to make in the case of “high order”? Is that absent
hyphen simply a typo, which the authors, had they
noticed it, would have taken pains to “correct” in
the interests of clarity and precision, or out of
mere sheer doctoral competence?
And what distinction do the hyphens clarify in
“competence-development”
and
“workassignment performance”? Is it the same in both
cases? The former can only mean the development
of competence, and that is what it would mean
without the hyphen. But if the latter means the
assignment of work, then the “fellows” must be
those who perform the assignment of the work
rather than the work itself. So what the hell is it
with these hyphens?
If you pay close attention to the sheer doctoral
scribbles of educationists, and if you assume that
unusual practice must serve some principle, you
will understand why nothing can be done about
schools. The people who manage them won’t even
pay attention to their own utterances, and they
serve no coherent principles. See what principle
you can derive from these forms, all from Estes
and Haskew:
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positionally-prominent individuals
opportunities to practice these strategies in a
classroom setting.
research and/or literature-synthesis
There. Now, if your work-assignment
performance has been high-level, you will be
smarting from office-insolence and in danger of
mind-o’erthrowment.
[VI:5, May 1982]
VIII
The Making of
Teachers
Awareness Grows in Cincinnati!
WE’VE been reading this really neat sheet from
Cincinnati. The public school system out there
gladly subsidizes the life of the mind by setting its
leading intellectuals up in a Department of
Curriculum and Instruction, where they need
never be troubled by the sight of an actual student.
This leaves them free to think deep thoughts about
new ways to share out the taxpayers’ money, and
to put out “The News from Planning and
Development,” an esoteric journal of difficult
ideas suitable for great minds. Most of it,
naturally, is way over our head. It’s heavy stuff,
all about on-going interaction and models whose
components are modules. Well, shoot, we can’t
even figure out how to devise the guidelines with
which to pilot our parameters, which is, according
to TNFP&D for July 1981, very de rigeur for
something or other.
Even the easy parts are hard to grasp. Here’s a
piece of “Writing Improvement Project Funded”:
The purpose of the training will be to make
teachers aware of the substantial body of
existing research concerning the teaching of
writing, enable them to develop and implement
a range of instructional material and writing
activities for improving their students’
composition skills, and provide them
Subtle. And professional. Real professional. An
ignorant amateur—someone like you, no doubt—
would want those teachers to know what has been
discovered in that “substantial body of existing
research.” (The body of nonexisting research is, of
course, insubstantial, and thus slightly less likely
to be funded.) The professionals know better. In
the first place, as any fool can see, it doesn’t
matter what that “research” may or may not have
come up with, since it obviously hasn’t done the
least damn bit of good. That’s why these teachers
don’t know it now. Teacher academies have better
things to do.
And that brings us to the second place: This is
school business, and school business trafficks in
stuff much more important than mere knowledge.
Anybody can find some knowledge, even without
so much as a facilitator, to say nothing of a whole
department of planning and development.
Sometimes, even without funding. And knowledge
without
awareness
is
dangerously
anti-humanistic; it may even lead to conclusions
that suggest that it is madness to imagine that we
need yet more “instructional material and writing
activities” concocted by a workshop full of
teacher academy graduates who have yet to be
made aware of all that “research.”
After things like awareness, development and
implementation, and the practice of strategies,
professionals prize most those collective exercises
which, like cold baths for monks, dampen the
anarchic flames of individualism. Now that the
time has come for a few of Cincinnati’s certified
teacher academy graduates to try to learn how to
write English, the professionals have provided
that
teachers will participate in the composing
process itself. They will write compositions and
critique their writings the same way as their
students would do the activities in their English
classes. The rationale for this approach is that
teachers must experience the writing process
before they can successfully teach the process to
their students. In other words, teachers of
writing must write themselves.
Ah, the great Composing Process Itself!
Always, like the wild dance of the quark, always
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going on somewhere. How wonderful to
participate in it. Lucky, lucky teachers, to
experience it. Such awareness. And lucky, too,
that they will “do the activities” just as their
students will do them, in the warm nest of
participatory democracy, where any opinion (or
awareness) is as good as any other, and where
self-esteem runs no risk of injury in the hands of
elitist authoritarianism armed with mere
knowledge.
The blind, you see, can lead the blind, provided
only that they all wander together in a dense mass.
Only those few way out on the edges will fall into
the ditch.
[V:8, November 1981]
Department of Gaga
WHEN
teachers in Santa Clara County get
homesick for that scholarly life they came to
know and love in teacher school, the local Dept.
of Ed. is happy to provide them lots more of it,
real neat stuff like this:
How they experience principles, we don’t know,
but we’d sure like to see it, maybe just as they get
to osmosis.
[VII:1, February 1983]
Voodoo Educology
Department of Temporal Plasticity
IT is a poet’s luxury to sit around and wonder
what the vintners buy one half so precious as the
stuff they sell. For us, it is harsh necessity to
discover what the school people learn one half so
preposterous as the stuff they teach. It’s not all
that easy, for the stuff they learn usually turns out
to be twice as preposterous as the stuff they teach.
We continue, nevertheless, to compile our
Katalogue of Kollege Kredit Kourses, in which
the following travesty is 4302.7Q. At the
University of Bridgeport, however, the very same
thing is advertised, to practicing and incipient
schoolteachers, as a course in tensory awareness,
worth three kollege kredits, and maybe a little
raise:
We will explore both theoretically and
experimentially [sic] how to develop positive
self-esteem in the classroom. We will create a
positive and validating climate, in which we can
relax, recharge and reinspire ourselves, and
reaffirm our own essential self-worth and learn
numerous classroom methods for facilitating
positive self-esteem in our classrooms.
We will use such methods as guided imagery,
positive focus, the language of responsibility,
physical
nurturance,
communication
recognition, strength identification, relaxation,
and many others to help our students learn to
accept themselves totally and learn to take
action in the world. (Fee $30.00)
And here’s a cheapy ($17) called “Science as a
Verb.” which it may be in their “language of
responsibility”:
Basic principles of science will be experienced
through activities appropriate for classroom
instruction; instruction will use common, easyto-come-by materials.
This course is designed to increase the
participant’s ability to read, interpret, process,
and respond to day-to-day sensory stimuli; to
give participants a literacy in the many
peripheral areas related to sensory perception
and awareness; to prepare teachers to help their
students expand the sensitivities of their eleven
senses.
The above has been taught to high school
seniors, to elementary and secondary school
teachers, school psychologists, counselors, and
social workers. The temporal plasticity of the
course comes from its great material depth. This
flexibility allows for an alteration of the subject
profile to better fulfill objectives for
participants.
We can explain some of that. The “great
material depth” of this kourse comes from the fact
that only the dead or deeply comatose suffer any
shortage of “day-to-day sensory stimuli.” The rest
of us have quite a few. And we can, if we please,
and if we can find a sap who will listen, natter
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about our stimuli. Since such nattering has the
same value whether it persists for ten minutes or
for ten weeks, those who persist in it enjoy the
blessing of temporal plasticity. They can knock
off early. And the instructor, who could also find
something better to do, can always “alter the
subject profile” so that the participants can get
plenty of flexibility out of the temporal plasticity
of material depth and drop in on the class only
when they have some really neat sensory stimuli
to interpret and process—good stuff from way out
in the tenth sense, maybe.
Some of it we can not explain. We do not, for
instance, understand those areas, the peripheral
ones that are said to be “related to sensory
perception and awareness.” We sort of wish that
the person who cooked up that description had
named maybe three or four of the areas he had in
mind. We can’t come up with a single one, and
the more we try, the more our sensitivities seem to
contract—in all eleven senses.
Nor is there any clue, as once there would have
been, in the assertion that those mysterious areas
are accessible to something called “literacy.” This
is, of course, the New Literacy, a far more
democratic skill than the old, of which many
innocents were deprived either by native
ignorance or induced stupidity. To the New
Literacy, which offers scads of neat options very
much like Bridgeport University’s “peripheral
area literacy,” ignorance and stupidity are no
impediments.
We found Sensory Awareness described, along
with a full dozen other kourses of like ilk, in a
brochure put out by a certain Redecision Institute
for Transactional Analysis. (Analysis of the
transaction in which the University of Bridgeport
agreed to give graduate credit for these kourses is
not provided.) RITA offers more lessons than
Madame la Zonga. From her, if peripheral area
literacy is not your bag, you can also learn: “using
stroking as a major stimulus to human
motivation”; “pupilometrics”; “techniques to
establish and maintain rapport with students and
elicit desirable responses”; and “strategies to
produce behavioral changes in colleagues, peer
group, couples, family, students, and parents.”
Exactly what a teacher needs. No nonsense about
math or literature or science—schoolteachers
already know all that stuff—just a heady
compound of Dale Carnegie and Dr. Goebbels.
And all that for a lousy three hundred and sixty
bucks a course.
In the old days, one of the day-to-day stimuli
well known to teachers, and right in a peripheral
area, was the sensory perception of sitting on a
tack. Those old pros, without having taken a
single course in sensory awareness, were
nevertheless able to “read, interpret, process, and
respond,” frequently managing to expand a few
student sensitivities at the same time. They had
what we would now call a kind of natural tacksitting literacy.
Nowadays, when the schoolteachers come, as
the excellence commission puts it, “from the
bottom quarter of graduating high-school and
college students,” we have to nurture in them
what teachers seem once to have had by nature.
So, if only they would use plenty of tacks, a
kourse in sensory awareness would be right to the
point. We could think of it as a way of sensitizing
the bottom quarter.
[VII:4, May 1983]
The Glendower Glitch
WHEN our zany educationists call spirits from
the vasty deep, the damned things actually do
come. If you so much as whisper, within the
hearing of one of those Porseffors of
PedaGog/Magoggery, the dread name of
Area-Awareness-Enhancement Modular On-site
Methods/Devices, you can be sure that a year later
you will find that very demon courted in
classrooms and workshops required for
certification. If you could name about four
hundred such spooky spirits you could summon
up a whole teacher-training academy. But don’t
do it. We have enough trouble now.
We were reminded of the awesome demonic
power of educationistic wordplay while reading
The Official* Grapevine. (That asterisk is in the
title, and it leads to this: “Published for the
Mounds View School District Staff,” of Arden
Hills, Minnesota. The next asterisk is ours.*) In an
article called “Process Completed” we found:
*
Luckily for the rest of us, the people who operate the
schools are as noncognitive about our Constitution as
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Dennis Peterson, Assistant Superintendent of
Instruction, has become one of 200
administrator perceiver specialists in the country
as certified by the Selection Research Institute
(SRI) of Lincoln, Nebraska.
The process toward certification, which
Peterson began in 1978, was completed on
Friday, November 14, at the conclusion of an
“intensive” 2 1/2 day training session held by
the SRI in Hopkins. “The process and basic
skills which the training develops are used
mainly to identify strengths in potential and
existing administrators and to focus on these
strengths in future personal development,” said
Peterson.
See how easy it is? All you have to do is stand
in the mystic diagram of existing aspects and
potential parameters, swivel slowly for about two
years (“intensively” for the final two and a half
days), relating to felt needs and chanting aloud the
subset of secret synonyms for the Great Perceiver,
and behold—a mere and humble Assistant
Superintendent of Instruction (surely he must be
destined for better things than that) is robed in the
greater glory of Administrator Perceiver
Specialistship!
Ah, the life of the mind! Where else but in the
schools could such wonders be worked? And just
think of what the future must bring. Quis percipiet
ipsos perceptores? By next year this time some
canny necromancer will have conjured up that
gaunt and grisly specter, nothing less than the
Great Perceiver Perceiver Himself. Then, while
Perceiver Specialist Peterson prowls the precincts
of the principals, perceiving administrators, both
existing and potential, hard on his heels follows
the furtive figure of a former facilitator turned
Perceiver
Specialist
Perceiver
Specialist,
perceiving Peterson’s very perceivings, also both
existing and potential. And next year. . . . The
mind reels. It even boggles a bit.
But the educationist dances and jigs. You get
grants for that sort of thing in the education
they are about everything else. They don’t know that
the Fifth Amendment would excuse them from sending
out all those silly newsletters and poopsheets. Well,
their ignorance is our bliss, so we urge our readers to
keep sending us that junk.
business, where it is presumed, and maybe with
good reason, that only a certified perceiver can
tell an industrious and effective administrator
(there must be some) from an overbearing
imbecile. In fact, any routine act of judgment
performed habitually by millions and millions of
only slightly observant citizens can become, if
given a spooky name, a “skill” to be taught and
eventually required. How, after all, can we trust
the perceptions of one who has never taken a
single course—not even one lousy workshop—in
perceiving? And how can you expect a
schoolteacher to relate to students without training
in relating? Indeed, how can you even expect a
teacher to answer a simple question in class
without a thorough appreciation of the concept of
microteaching in the classroom situation.
Microteaching. A potent demon. As it happens,
we do understand microteaching. We’ve been
reading all about it in an essay, or something,
“Understanding Microteaching as a Concept,” by
one Robert J. Miltz, who admits that he is the
director of the microteaching laboratory in the
school of education at the University of
Massachusetts. What it might mean to understand
something “as a concept” rather than as some
other thing, we do not understand, but the man
says:
Most educators know microteaching as a scaled
down encounter where a teacher teaches for a
short period of time (5-10 minutes) to a small
number of students (4-5), with the typical
microteaching sessions including the teaching of
a lesson and immediate supervisory and pupil
feedback. This model has been useful over the
years to demonstrate the concept of
microteaching. The unfortunate aspect of this
model is that it is usually interpreted as the
essence of the microteaching concept, this
interpretation has severely limited the use and
development of microteaching. Microteaching,
as a concept, is not simply a scaled down
teaching encounter, it is much more.
There is nothing a laboratory director deplores
more than an unfortunate aspect interpreted as an
essence, especially when such an obtuse
misinterpretation might severely limit the use and
development of exactly that potion that he cooks
up for the taxpayers, who already seem restless in
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Massachusetts. What we deplore is the failure to
understand, as a concept, or even as a precept, the
logical outrage of run-on sentences. But Miltz has
better hope of remedy than we. We’ve just never
been able to build up a market for coherent and
conventional prose among the educationists, while
they can easily sell one another (bills to the
taxpayers) any old remnants or seconds they have
lying around. Maybe it’s packaging. Notice how
astutely Miltz relabels his product, lest all the
schoolteachers in Massachusetts tumble to the fact
that they’ve been microteaching all their lives, by
gum, and that it’s no macrodeal:
What then is the microteaching concept? In its
fullest sense the microteaching concept is an
opportunity for a person or group of persons to
present or develop something to another person
or group and then take a look at what was done.
This model opens up a wide range of
possibilities not available in the more traditional
model of microteaching.
There. That should do it. Now we can
understand as a concept that almost anything,
anything from football in Foxborough to a
message from E. F. Hutton, is really just a form of
microteaching, and that Miltz is about as far out
on the cutting edge as you can hope to get.
But, of course, it’s not to the point that we
understand. The other educationists have to
understand, and that, as Miltz obviously knows,
requires reinforcement mediated by expectable
parameters of learning disabilities in both
individuals and groups:
First, unlike the traditional model, the definition
does not limit microteaching to one person
presenting information. There can be more than
one.
Our definitive studies have shown that three out
of five educationists at least eighty-two times out
of a hundred will, having carefully read that
passage, exhibit certain behaviors that may be
perceived, by some duly certified perceiver, as
relevant to an appreciation of the concept of
microteaching as a definition unlike a model
limited to one person. That Miltz knows his
audience.
Miltz takes the last “unfortunate aspect” of
microcity out of microteaching by pointing out
that “the idea that any size or type of group can be
utilized as the receivers eliminates the belief that
one must have only a small group of students.”
How true. And the idea that a pig could be called
a cow and bread, cake would eliminate an
unfortunate aspect of that tired old belief that if
we had some ham we could have a ham sandwich
if only we had some bread.
And bread is cake. Miltz makes that clear by
telling us that “the idea of presenting or
developing something frees the restriction that it
must be a teaching lesson.” And now, that captive
restriction free at last, we understand as a concept
that microteaching need be neither micro nor
teaching. It need only be funded.
But there’s one more thing. Feedback. Without
videotaping machinery, which takes lots of
funding, “it must be honestly stated that
[microteaching] can’t be done as effectively.” So,
whether we have “the holding of a problem
session,” or “an administrator [who] can gain
useful insight into his effectiveness” even without
the help of an administrator perceiver specialist,
or even “a teacher who wants to investigate her
relationship with a student on an individual basis,”
“for small groups or even larger [that should just
about cover it] groups,” “the real power and
benefit comes from being able to actually see
yourself doing something.” And furthermore:
There is no restrictions [sic] on the way one
receives feedback or the type of feedback one
receives. It is simply stated that the person or
persons have an opportunity to see themselves
in action. . . . A person may look at the
videotape alone, or with peers, or with an
outside supervisor, or with students, or with any
number of alternatives.
Well, we don’t yet have our own microteaching
laboratory here at Glassboro, but we have
discovered that everything recommended by Miltz
can be readily provided, contingent only on a little
funding, at this really neat little motel just this
side of Atlantic City. They’ve even been known to
provide, at no extra charge, an occasional
Microteaching Encounter Perceiver Specialist.
[V:1, January 1981]
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The Sound of One Eraser Clapping
Every Monday I listen to sundry
administrators lecturing the faculty on how
we must employ the various aspects of
curricular media to enhance the quality of
education within the context of modern
techniques and facilities.. . . The faculty is
thinking of asking for nap rugs and milk
during the films.. . . Burn this letter! If my
principal finds it, she’ll make me clap my
own erasers for a week and cut my audiovisual access for a month.
YOU have just read excerpts from a poignant
letter—nine pages, with footnotes—written to us
by a public school teacher somewhere in the
United States. That’s all we are willing to tell you
about him, except, of course, for his name. His
name is Legion.
We get hundreds of letters like his every year
from schoolteachers driven to frenzy by jargonbesotted, half-witted administrators, the officious
noncombatants of the school war. You may recall
the type. Twelve miles behind the lines, in neatly
pressed uniforms, they drank fresh coffee and told
you exactly how to enhance operational outcomes
through implementation of alternative modes.
The teachers in the trenches are not
educationists. Some of the least able do, of course,
want to improve their lots by taking more
education courses and becoming either junior
assistant curriculum facilitators or teacher
academy deans, whichever comes easier. Most of
them, however, know all too well that the battle in
the classroom is only with ignorance, a beatable
foe, while the enemy back at headquarters is
armed with intransigent stupidity, the vast, dead
weight of established educationism, pavilioned in
jargon and girded in cant. Even more than the
children in their classes, the teachers are victims
of an institutionalized anti-intellectualism, dazed
and ragged survivors of the values clarification
concentration camp. Some children, therefore,
will have the inestimable advantage of having for
teachers resolute dissidents devoted to the pursuit
of knowledge and the practice of thought, which
depend absolutely on reading and writing.
Those who write to us, of course, are dissidents.
We wish we could help them all. We wish we
could print and dissect all those documents they
send us, the mindless maunderings of the
ignoramuses who set standards and make policy
in the schools. We wish we could tell every tale
told us out of school, funny but excruciating
accounts of that militant mickeymousery called
teacher-training.* But we can’t do it all. We do,
however, have some advice and comfort for
desperate dissidents.
Remember that you are not alone. The others
are waiting for someone else. And even if they are
slow to surface, remember that one working mind
with a mimeograph machine can demoralize a
whole platoon of superintendents and curriculum
coordinators armed with bizarre mail-order
doctorates.
Find that mimeograph machine, or make a deal
with a friendly printer. Tell him Tom Paine sent
you. The unspeakable acts of that rear echelon are
detectable, as mental acts must be, in language, so
publish abroad the very words, with brief, suitable
comment, of those inane and ignorant memos and
directives. Comment only on the words, for which
the public has paid, but do name the wordmonger.
Leave batches of broadsides in the faculty lounge
while your colleagues are unconscious, immersed
in hair care and motorcycle magazines. You will
be amazed at how far and fast the word will
spread.
Go to the public, who pays you, remember, for
the work of your mind. Take a lesson from a high
school English teacher in Philadelphia, one
Ronald James, who is willing and able to do the
work of his mind on the editorial page of The
Bulletin. Here is what he says, for instance, about
some visitation by one of those HQ wonders:
The greater part of this specialist’s presentation
was devoted to providing teachers with . . .
“accomodative strategies” for teaching students
with reading and writing problems. He urged us
to permit such students to “meet curricular
objectives” (read: pass the course) with such
“project activities” as charts, collages, mobiles,
models and drawings. We were also instructed
to provide our students with “alternative
*
Nevertheless, we do intend to print and circulate a
little anthology of appalling anecdotes, anonymously or
not, as contributors choose. Please keep sending them
in. Stick to the facts—who, what, where, when. We
have the other eraser.
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response modes” (read: don’t insist that they
write) including tape recording of lessons as
well as oral tests.
“Color the Ballons.” I had intended to send the
original, but I can’t bear to part with such a
treasure.
One Ronald James, in one column, will tell
more truth about the Basic Minimum Competence
Hoax, or anything else, than the District
Department of Information Services, busy
“educating” the public, will disgorge in a decade.
Go and do thou likewise. Pay no attention to your
union, whining in chorus with administrators
about the natural and proper appetite of the press
for bad news about schools. Feed that appetite,
and test your union’s pious devotion to whatever
it means by “quality” education.
At the very least, you can send a copy of this
article to your favorite curriculum facilitator or
superintendent of schools. He won’t understand it
very well, of course, but he will feel an enhanced
awareness of doom.
And he asks, with this and other similar matters in
mind, “What the hell should I do!!!!” (That’s
right: 4 !’s.)
Another irate parent sends Update, the
newsletter of the Keystone Central School District
in Lock Haven, PA, where the molders of young
minds say:
All incoming seventh grade students will be
tested during the first two weeks of school in
mathematics and english. The purpose of this
testing is to find out at what competency level
the students are functioning. This will allow the
teachers to pinpoint specific weaknesses a
student may have and help him to improve it
during the year. In order to determine the
progress a student may have made during the
year, they will be tested again in June.
[IV:8, November 1980]
The Ballons Nodule
CITIZENS out in the real world, usually but not
always parents of schoolchildren, write to us
complaining about the bozos who run the schools.
The complainers often send evidence, which we
are delighted to have, of course, but all too many
of them go on to whine about their supposed
helplessness and frustration. That puzzles us. We
thought every American would know what to do
with evidence of official malfeasance, even when,
as in the case of the schools, the presumed
protectors of the public interest are themselves the
miscreants.
We have, for instance, a letter from an irate
father in Wisconsin. Although he was relieved to
learn that his son had not in fact been put into a
nodule, he found that his tolerance of typos did
not extend to big black caps:
A handout (of material, of course) was given to
my son in his kindergarten class. It was a
picture of a clown holding a bunch of ballons. I
knew right away that they were ballons because
the instructions on the top of the page said,
OK. Here’s what you do. Do not bother going to
the schools. The people who make policy there
are ignorant or negligent or both. How do you
think such things happen in the first place?
Besides, the school people lose nothing when you
complain and gain nothing when you approve;
they get your money either way.
But do go to your local newspaper. With any
luck at all, you’ll find there a gnarled editor who
once learned to diagram sentences, or a smartass
young reporter fresh from the minimum
competence circus. Newspapers don’t get tax
money, and juicy stories about ignorant
educationists are happily popular just now. So
strike while the irony is hot, or shut up and color
your ballons.
[IV:9, December 1980]
Yet Another for the Gipper
“SPORTS,” as Heywood Hale Broun astutely
observed, “do not build character. They reveal it.”
And that gives a new insight, perhaps, into Vince
Lombardi’s penetrating analysis of the fearful
danger implicit in the academic enterprise: “A
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school without football is in danger of
deteriorating into a medieval study hall.” And
that, of course, would be the end not only of
American education as we know and love it but
probably of the Hula Bowl as well.
Well, it’s high time somebody just said it
straight out, so here it is, ready or not, as the case
may be: In spite of Roger Staubach’s terrific
grade-point average and Howard Cosell’s truly
awesome vocabulary, and in spite of all that the
Pacific Ten and the Football Mothers of
Wellsburg, West Virginia, have done to show
their support for the American way of life, there
still exists, in this great land of ours, a mean streak
of anti-athleticism. And some of it, sad to relate,
is right in the schools.
But don’t you worry, because we can guarantee
you that there’s one place that won’t deteriorate
into some dreary study hall, not while Head
Football Coach Paul S. Billiard is around. Now
while we don’t have the figures, we’d guess that
Head Coach Billiard’s Bruins at Brooke High
School in Wellsburg must have some phenomenal
record, for we have been privileged to read the
coach’s letter to the new football parents. He’s a
man who came to play, and right at the opening
gun he tackles the dilemma of anti-athleticism by
both horns:
Please impress upon [your son] that he is about
to take a giant step in his young life, that of
entering high school and participating in
interscholastic athletics.
Now that’s to lay it on the line, reveal character,
and clarify values, all at once.
Coach Billiard has not, like some others we
could name, knuckled under the mystique of
intellectualism that still runs all too rampant even
in some good high schools with very fine teams.
Educator though he is, the coach does not flaunt
his erudition around by talking over the heads of
the parents and Football Mothers, which is just
what happens all too often with guidance
counsellors and curriculum facilitators and other
such members of the higher-up intelligentsia in
the public schools, who don’t often seem to have
the knack of finding easy words that laymen can
understand. Even when he has to use the highly
specialized technical language of the professional
of education in order to describe something very
subtle and complicated, Coach Billiard can find a
way to make at least the gist of it clear to almost
anyone of any educational level:
We have raised over $12,000 to help improve
facilities in our strength room. Our strength
facilities are second to none, but facilities must
be facilitated (used).
You see? It can be done.
And, unlike some academics who always seem
to think that their subjects are more important
than any others, Coach Billiard recognizes that
there’s more to high school than just football.
There may be basketball and baseball as well, and
the coach favors the basics for any sport at all:
We are saying that the strength improvement
phase is a very integral part of our total
program. It is a fact that a stronger athlete is a
better athlete regardless of what sport he is
involved.
Athleticism, unlike such cold subjects as
biology and algebra, teaches the warm human
values. You don’t see physicists patting each
others’ bottoms, and microbiologists don’t even
have awards banquets where they can express
their gratitude to all the wonderful people who
made it all possible. But in one sentence from
Coach Billiard, a bright boy can learn some real
human values that he might never pick up in your
standard English course:
I would be remissed if I neglected to mention
the outstanding cooperation and support that our
program receives from our Principal . . .
Now can you imagine some math teacher writing
to the parents of new students actually giving due
and proper credit to the principal of the school for
supporting the teaching of math? Probably not,
because the people who end up teaching things
like math, even if they aren’t consciously antiathleticists, do tend to be lacking in teammindedness. They’re off in their own little corners
perusing esoteric special interests like history and
literature.
Hardly anyone, of course, would deny that there
is a place for such things in the high schools,
especially for that certain kind of student. But we
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do have to remember that such studies do not tend
to foster team-mindedness. Actually, they usually
have the opposite effect. After all, we do have to
admit that there is something basically selfish and
unsportsmanlike about learning such things as
trigonometry or French. Those things may be all
well and good for the person who learns them, but
can you imagine what would happen to team spirit
if all the players wanted to learn things only
because of what was in it for them?
Furthermore, many of those subjects are
unrealistically difficult, and even a very good
player can find that the self-esteem that he loses in
the French class doesn’t always come back on the
playing field. That’s the sort of thing that brings
on a bad attitude, the worst possible of all
educational outcomes. And it is the Coach
Billiards of this world, and not the teachers of
French and trigonometry, who know exactly
where bad attitudes come from and how to guard
against them:
We discourage those individuals with poor
attitudes to “shape up or ship out.” A young
man will not receive a bad attitude from
participating in our system. If he is in trouble at
home or elsewhere, his potential of carrying that
characteristic into athletics is highly possible.
Therefore, we are not about to base our program
around individuals who are going to deter from
the success of the team. (If the family can’t
handle the situation, don’t complain when the
coaches or school has to.)
And isn’t that really the problem in so many of
the non-athletic portions of a high school
education, which are, in fact, based around
individuals who do deter from the success of the
team?
Coach Billiard hits the old nail right on the old
head when he closes his letter with:
We hope that the preceding material has
provided you with some needed information and
supplied you with incite of the basic philosophy
. . . of our program.
We’d like to believe that the parents were as
incited as they should have been, but you know
how parents are. Some of them don’t even care
who wins, so long as the kids are off the streets.
But if those parents will do just one little thing,
there may be hope. Let them at least follow the
advice in the coach’s P.S.: “Please allow your son
to read this letter so that all of us are speaking the
same language.” On that great day when we all
speak the coach’s language, there will be no
deterring from success whatever sport we are
involved, and anti-athleticism will trouble us no
more.
[IV:8, November 1980]
IX
Mangled Language
(Advanced Division)
The Porseffors of Eglinsh
PITY the Porseffors of Eglinsh, bearing through
throngs of foes, of labourers and shop-boys, the
chalice of sweet speech, language pure and
undefiled. Dumb as old medallions, but not mute,
they hear, in a place of disaffection, a grating roar
of new men, other minds, hailing the only
emperor, the emperor of ice cream. Ambiguities
of seven sorts they understand, but from inservice
aspects of remediation, shrink. Objective their
correlative may be, and their fallacy pathetic, but
parameters of inputs, outcomes, data-based
transpersonal perceptions, they eschew. By rabble
ringed, they stand and wait, bravely singing as
they shine, but with so dull a cheer, their glittering
thoughts struck out at ev’ry line. You should have
it so good.
So here’s how they sing: “The latter poet, in his
own final phase, already burdened by an
imaginative solitude that is almost a solipsism,
holds his own poem so open again to the
precursor’s work that at first we might believe the
wheel has come full circle, and that we are back in
the latter poet’s flooded apprenticeship, before his
strength began to assert itself in the revisionary
ratios. But the poem is now held open to the
precursor, where once it was open, and the
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uncanny effect is that the new poem’s
achievement makes it seem to us, not as though
the precursor were writing it, but as though the
latter poet himself had written the precursor’s
characteristic work.”
Of course. “And,” out of the revisionary ratios
of a bailed-out apprenticeship, another selfprecursing poet explains, “everyone will say, as
you walk your mystic way, ‘If this young man
expresses himself in terms too deep for me, why
what a very singularly deep young man this deep
young man must be!’”
That turgid, pretentious prose, however, is not
the work of a deep young man. It is the work of a
mentor of deep young men. He is a distinguished
scholar and Porseffor of Eglinsh at Yale
University, a school in Connecticut. (We’d tell
you his name if we could, of course, but the reader
who sent in this example did not provide it. We
have no way to discover it, either, since all
members of our staff are forbidden to read PMLA,
to say nothing of the insightful, trenchant, and
seminal volumes of literary ruminations produced
with no base thoughts of profit by the university
presses. Let’m publish and perish, is what we say
around here.)
Imagine, if you can, the contempt such a
Porseffor must feel for a misplaced modifier.
Conjure up his long exhalation as he averts his
gaze, but delicately, from failure of agreement
between subject and verb. Hear him pronounce, so
subtly, the quotation marks by virtue of which he
can say “feedback” with impunity.
We have said of the Professionals of Education
that their language is inhuman and so all the more
reprehensible in those who boast of their
“humanistic” values. The inhuman language of
the Porseffors of Eglinsh, loftily proud of their
selfless devotion to the “humanities,” is no less
reprehensible. From the least intellectual inmates
of Academe, we hear about catalytical nondisciplines facilitating us to move through a metatransition. From the campus aristocrats we hear
about imaginative solitude, probably to be
distinguished from some imaginable imaginary
solitude or perhaps from an imagined solitude—or
both. Where the Professional twists our minds by
centering his studies around, the Porseffor assaults
our reason with an almost solipsism, no more
understandable than an almost pregnancy. (Sure
sounds neat, though, don’t it?) He further asks us
to accept—by faith alone, obviously, for nothing
else would suffice—his oh-so-sensitive distinction
between the poem now held open and the same
poem when it merely was open. And, in the center
of this pretentious mess, we find a shabby banality
in that wheel coming full circle, just the kind of
cheap cliché we might expect of the erstwhile
wrestling coach who has taken a few courses at
the local teacher academy and worked his way up
to the rank of guidance counsellor.
Most of the barbarians who trouble these times
can be easily identified by their native costumes—
white belts, polyester double-knit leisure suits,
sometimes even love beads. But the subtlest
barbarian of all generally wears pure wool, a
refined form of sheep’s clothing. For pulling over
eyes, wool has that polyester stuff beat all hollow.
[III:4, April 1979]
The Reformulation of
Conceptualization
THE proposal from which the excerpt below is
reprinted was submitted in March of 1980 to a
certain Society for Research in Child
Development, as to which we can tell you nothing
more than its ominous name. To speak of children
as “developing” is to reveal a nasty insensitivity
both to language and to children. Complications
develop, and images, but children learn. Or they
would, if we gave as much time and effort to
teaching them as we do to the profitable business
of establishing societies and soliciting grants for
the study of their development.
There are surely no Americans who are just now
in greater need of good teaching than those
“minority status children” to the study of whose
development this proposal claims to address itself.
Must that teaching—and must their learning—
wait upon the “findings,” probably the “definitive
findings,” of some people who are unable to make
their verbs and subjects agree? Will the stupefying
disadvantages against which such hapless children
must struggle daily be somehow mitigated by the
discoveries of self-appointed savants who seem to
suppose that “multiple” is a classy synonym for
“many”? What can they understand or help others
to understand who cannot see the absurdity of “a
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comprehensive
perspective,”
the
logical
equivalent of an extensive point? When the
formulators of conceptualizations go on to
reformulate their conceptualizations, what,
exactly, will they have done?
The cited passage is not anomalous. It is typical
of the entire proposal, which is characterized not
only by frequent errors in grammar and
punctuation but, much worse, by mind-twisting
absurdities born of tormented syntax, and what
can only be a ritual recitation of unexamined
jargon. The proposal, which awards itself the
distinction of being “new and exciting,” and offers
to “do . . . developmental and ecological views,”
promises to do them “while concurrently focusing
(although indirectly) on historical influences
which impact differentially the contextual
experiences of minority group children who live
in a majority group culture.”
(Those children are called, apparently in hope
not of precise distinction but only of stylish
variation, sometimes “minority group children,”
or sometimes “minority status children,” and
occasionally
mere
“minority
children.”
Fortunately for the sanity of us all, the proposers
seem not to have noticed the possibility of naming
those other children, whose curious and
unaccountable existence they must have had in
mind in that last part: the minority group children
who don’t live in a majority group culture.)
If you were a ninth-grade composition teacher
charged with the education of a student who had
written that passage, what would you do? Where
would you begin? Would it seem at all to the point
simply to tell him that differentially does not mean
in different ways, or that while and concurrently
add up to redundancy? Do you think he would
take much profit from a discussion of the
contradiction in his intention to “focus
indirectly”? And could you hope to convince him
that impact, especially as a transitive verb, has lost
its force through too much use in the trendy
jargon of grant proposals? What could you do to
make clear to such a mind what is wrong with
“contextual experiences,” of which he is very,
very proud?
Forget it. What that writer needs is not a lesson
in this and that, not a handbook of helpful hints,
but an education, a mind raised up in the habit of
literacy and the skill (it is one and the same thing)
of language and thought.
What happened to this proposal, we don’t know.
It was probably funded by that Society for
Research in Child Development, or by some
similar outfit, which will now point with pride to
its mighty good works. Furthermore, the givers of
such grants can rarely be distinguished from the
takers, and they are ordinarily quite impressed by
things like contextual experiences and the
reformulation of conceptualizations. And anyway,
it’s not their money. It’s yours.
Spencer and Brookins teach psychology, Allen,
sociology. They may be “minority status”
grown-ups themselves. (Do you suppose that they
will be pleased to be so designated?) And, if they
are, they are the only “minority status” citizens in
the land who will take any profit from the funding
of this proposal, which will impact differentially
on their contextual experiences, but won’t be what
they need.
_____________
An excerpt from:
The Social and Affective Development of
Minority Status Children
A Proposal submitted by: Margaret Beale
Spencer, Ph. D., Emory University;
Geraldine Kearse Brookins, Ph. D., Jackson
State University; and Walter Recharde
Allen, Ph. D., University of Michigan.
The multiple issues raised suggests that a
particular type of structure and composition for
the study group is required. Thus, the
accomplishment of the aforementioned aims
require that the meeting be from a more
comprehensive perspective. It is viewed as
appropriate, in fact imperative, to conduct the
study group conference in a “stepwise” fashion by
holding two sessions over the extended period of
time thus allowing adequate time between
meetings to distill ideas and reformulate
conceptualizations.
[V:1, January 1981]
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Strangers in Paradigms,
or, The Hegemony Connection
WE are not guilty of omitting capital letters in
the title of the passage reprinted below. Nor is
that omission to be accounted, strictly speaking,
an “error,” except, of course, in taste. It is merely
an example of what is known to printers as
“cockroach typography,” an affectation once
thought more appropriate in ads for emporia
devoted to the swift removal of unsightly hair
than to the announcement of scholarly colloquia
on the “richness—past, present, and future—of
our collective humanistic treasury.”
Cockroach typography is named after archy,
that courageous cummings of cockroaches, who
had to write his poetry by diving headfirst onto
the typewriter keys, but could not manage the
shift. And had the describer of “the paradigm
exchange” been required to compose his piece in
the same way, Earth would be more fair.
The paradigm exchange took place not, as you
might well imagine, at Checkpoint Charlie in a
murky fog, but at the University of Minnesota in a
murky fog. It might not have been, however, quite
the innocent romp it seems. Indeed, our staff
cryptanalyst has concluded that the colloquium
was nothing less than a “cover” for a covert
operation laid on by a band of royalty-rich
humanities professors in collusion with the
international banking and fund-laundering cartel.
In support of his hypothesis, he contends that the
cited passage is obviously in code, which he
unravels thus: “Taking stock. Capitalize currency
exchanges [and/or] brokerages. Coin bank
deposits richness treasury.”
Well, while we do admit that an international
conspiracy of professors and bankers is certainly
more plausible than a brokerage characterized by
exchanges of tools and explorations of modes, and
than the examination of forms (and the paradigms
themselves) through the’ application of modes;
and while it is true that the supposedly decoded
message makes a bit more sense than the original
text, we’re just not buying’ it. Those folk are
intellectuals, dammit! They aren’t even a pack of
educationists,
never
mind
international
conspirators. We’re going to give them the benefit
of the doubt and assure you that there is probably
nothing more sinister in that passage than a
muddled and inappropriate metaphor, some
vainglorious but routine jargon, and perhaps a
pervasive malaise compounded of pretentiousness
and the perfectly justifiable fear of academicians
that no one out in the world is taking them
seriously.
But the cryptanalyst remains unconvinced. He
smugly points out that this so-called paradigm
exchange provides a morning session called
“Accounting for the Disciplines” (his italics), and
then an afternoon session, “More Accounting for
the Disciplines” (ditto). We reply that disciplines
do indeed seem to require lots of accounting for,
especially those that might be brokered through
papers about “Modes of Space and Interiority:
Ontology or Sociology,” “Proust’s Paradigm: A
Production, a Figure, an Object of Reading,” to
say nothing of “‘Sociality’ and ‘Historicity’ as
Categories in Literary Reception” and the
“Hegemony of Interpretation.”
That was the point that convinced our stubborn
decoder. He finally had to admit that no
self-respecting gang of hard-eyed money
manipulators and bagmen would take the risk of
doing business with bozos who run so easily off at
the mouth. Only a public institution of higher
learning can take a chance like that.
So, thank goodness, the paradigm exchange was
probably just a harmless frolic of porseffors. And
why not? If the poets are to be the
unacknowledged legislators of the world, they
will surely need some help, some bureaucrats and
appliers of analytical models, some paperpushers
and methodologists of analysis and interpretation.
Those artist types are clever enough in their own
little specialties, but you can’t expect them to
handle the hard stuff. For that you need
porseffors.
It happened once that archy’s boss, Don
Marquis, invited the insect to visit him at home,
provided only that he come without any friends or
kinfolk. To that, the Villon of vermin replied:
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you should have learned
by this time
that literature
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So where is that cockroach, now that we need
him?
____________
the paradigm exchange
Taking stock of the state of critical inquiry in
the humanities and arts, this colloquium
capitalizes on the diversity among the disciplines,
and the currency of creative theories and
methodologies
of
textual
analysis
and
interpretation that bring changing perspectives to
scholars and students. Exchanges of texts and
tools and explorations of new modes of
humanistic thinking characterize the brokerage of
the colloquium. Through application of numerous
analytical models, a variety of art forms will be
examined. This will be followed by an
examination of the paradigms themselves, coined
in the realms that bank deposits from
anthropology, physics, history, and linguistics, to
literature, philosophy, sociology, and psychology.
The Colloquium aims to inventory the richness—
past, present, and future—of our collective
humanistic treasury.
[V:2, February 1981]
Respeak In Monmouth
I am pleased to inform you that the Basic
Skills Center is henceforth, to be known as
the Center for Developmental Education.
Dr. Andreach, Coordinator of the Basic Skill
Center will be known as Coordinator of
Developmental Education. Increasingly,
colleges are dropping the basic skills
connotation that goes with the kind of center
we have established and are looking to the
developmental aspects since they have more
of a positive connotation than do basic
skills.
WE keep watching for harbingers of 1984. The
job is a cinch. Our maps bristle with pins, and we
have often discovered readings as high as 9.7 on
the logograph recorder. All the outlying stations
report the same thing, and all the instruments
agree. Just before the end, we will try to send out
one last signal; but, should something go wrong,
you may have to do that for us. We suggest: “The
lights in the sky are stars.”
We once brought you the news that literacy had
become “a feeling of self worth and importance,
and respect for an appreciation and understanding
of other people and cultures.” Just a few days ago,
we heard from a mole at the Department of
Education, soon to be retreaded as the Ministry of
Truth. The DOE, we were told, no longer harbors
any of those “change-agents,” who had come to
be looked on, by uninformed but noisy critics who
proved impervious to re-education, as intrusive
social manipulators. The change-agents, having
passed through a larval stage as facilitators, have
now emerged as linkers. Linkers, along with
programs for linker-training and linkage
enhancement will soon hatch out in every teacher
academy in America.
Now we have the announcement quoted above.
It is the work, the deed, one might better say, of
one Samuel H. Magill, who is currently known as
the president of Monmouth College in West Long
Branch, New Jersey. We would like to admire his
brass, for he says right out a shabby truth that
most educationists would rather not tell. We
suspect, however, that it was not out of brass but
simply out of thoughtlessness that he gave away
such an important trade secret. His use of commas
is not characteristic of a cunning contriver, and his
notion that connotations can be “dropped” at will
is more likely a result of ignorance than of
arrogance.
Nevertheless, he achieves the intended goal.
Respeak takes its power from the fact that most
people are not inclined to discriminate between
what something does or is and what it is known
as. Any educationistic enterprise can instantly win
favor and support by giving its centers and
coordinators, or anything else, fresh new outfits of
the latest designer fashions in sheep’s clothing.
And the educationistic establishment takes from
its own Respeak a double advantage. It can go on
forever inculcating whatever combination of
meager skills and pop notions it chooses to call
“literacy,” and it can thus assure itself an endless
supply of those very people who are not inclined
to discriminate between what something does or is
and what it is known as.
It’s a neat racket, and it would be horrible
enough if it were operated by a pack of hard-eyed
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villains who knew exactly what they were doing.
The truth, however, is even more horrible.
There are, of course, some villains. There are
agency spawned educrats and grant-hustlers who
really do profit from “increased spending.” There
are book and gadget boosters who make big bucks
from innovative thrusts. And there are even some
supreme villains, ideological rather than venal,
who want to fashion society to suit their
ideologies. But those are just a few of the big kids
playing hardball. Samuel H. Magill is not in that
game.
The Magills of educationism, in all their
thousands, are not villains. They are just modules,
plugged into openings here and there. Any one
will do. It’s the function of a component that is
needed, not the judgment of a mind. It doesn’t
matter whether Magill understands what he says.
It matters only that he who is currently known as
the president says it. It is the greatest triumph of
our schools that they fit their victims to become
their agents.
“All machines,” wrote Thoreau, “have their
friction. But when the friction comes to have its
machine, let us not have such a machine any
longer.”
[VI:3, March 1982]
They Also Serve
Who Only Look for Work
THIS
isn’t going to be easy, so try to pay
attention. We are about to quote from a poopsheet
(what a splendid term!) called Bulletin on Public
Relations and Development for Colleges and
Universities. The Bulletin is quoting, with
approbation, Ivan E. Frick, president of Elmhurst
College in Elmhurst, Illinois. Frick will be
quoting, also with approbation, Cohen and March,
who
must
be
members
of
the
educationistic-administrative mutual approbation
complex. Here we go:
Presidential leadership is always needed to get a
college of any size to move and that task is
seldom easy. Cohen and March did a study of
leadership among college presidents and
developed a theory . . . they called “organized
anarchy.” They said:
An organization is a collection of choices
looking for problems, issues and feelings
looking for decision situations in which they
might be aired, solutions looking for issues to
which there might be answers, and decision
makers looking for work.
There is considerable truth in this. An example
is when one prepares a case statement for a
capital drive. Establishing the case is not a
simple process; its path is not linear, that is a
straight line from one agreement to the next one.
The process is always filled with a tremendous
amount of ambiguity.
It is kind of Frick to explain the meaning of
“linear,” although his explanation does leave us to
wonder whether that path from one agreement to
the next might perhaps be a crooked line. But a
crooked line is still a line, and so Frick must be
saying that there is no line of any kind that leads
from one agreement to the next. That would
certainly make sense, allowing for a tremendous
amount of ambiguity, of course, to anyone who
has ever noticed the doings of educationistic
administrators, but it’s unusual for a college
president to put it in writing.
And it’s kind of Frick—ah, what a teacher he
must have been before he was dragged from the
classroom into the thankless prominence of
presidency—to provide us an honest-to-goodness
example to help us understand that “considerable
truth” in Cohen and March. We do have to
confess that the really heavy thinkers, like
Heidegger and Cohen and Hegel and March, are
way over our heads. If it weren’t for Frick’s
illuminating example, we would probably never
have been able to understand why solutions would
want to go looking for issues that might already
have perfectly good answers of their own, unless
they (the solutions) wanted, most uncharitably,
and, one might well say in this context, quite
contrary to accepted principles of academic
collegiality, to replace them (the answers) with
themselves (the solutions), thus leaving them (the
answers) nothing more than disembodied shades
flitting through the gloomy nether world of
decision situations, looking for whatever issues
the solutions might have spurned, because they
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(the issues) were not the kind to which there
might be answers, the very kind for which they
(the solutions) are looking. We wouldn’t even
have been able to figure out whether those issues
for which solutions are looking are the very issues
that are themselves looking, along with feelings,
for decision situations. But now, thanks to Frick,
everything is perfectly clear. Only a bona fide
college president, by gosh, could have detected
and revealed that much considerable truth.
Ivan Frick is not the only college president
quoted by the Bulletin on etc. etc. (You can get
your own copy, if you like, from Gonser Gerber
Tinker Stuhr [whatever that, or they, may be], 105
W. Madison, Chicago 60602.) We also get to hear
from Dan C. Johnson, of Mount St. Clare College
in Clinton, Iowa. He tells us that “there are few, if
any, institutional activities which cannot be
enhanced by presidential presence.”
Yeah, sure. The enhancing presidential
presence. Let us be thankful that classroom
teaching is at the bottom of any administrator’s
list of “Institutional activities” and thus the least
likely to be enhanced by the presidential presence.
learned at Stanford and applying it [sic] to
marketing and managing the various services
districts require.”
Well. Of course. We do have some grasp of
planning coordination, which involves not mere
planning, but the far subtler arts of planning to
plan, and planning whether to plan. That might be
what Cohen and March should have meant by
“issues and feelings looking for decision
situations in which they might be aired.” But the
rest of it is murky. What does one do when he
manages a “service districts require”? Does he
order paper towels according to those techniques
learned at Stanford? Is it appropriate for the
employee who manages services, whatever that
might mean, to market them as well? And to what,
exactly, is this mysterious responsibility added? In
short, what does this man do for a living?
Fortunately, we need not speculate. McHenry
describes his labors in the cause of the life of the
mind:
Districts are our clients. Under the new planning
program, we will hopefully do a better job of
determining what the needs are in the field and,
given, how we can meet those district needs.
This will be a lot more than just asking a
simple question of do you want a certain kind of
service, which is what they (the districts) have
been asked before. It is a matter of what is the
potential, and, what is the possibility of getting
resources for it—either from the County Office
or from some other source. We will be looking
at the whole scenario.
We are going to start doing an overall look.
The first year is not going to be extensive, but
we have to find out what the attitudes are out
there for the need and provision of services. It
will be much more than a needs assessment.
[VI:4, April 1982]
Missing Linker?
SPEAKING
of decision makers looking for
work, we suspect that we have discovered a
genuine linker, one of those erstwhile
change-agents turned ex-facilitators about whom
we warned you. He is Terry McHenry, whose title
would make a Byzantine emperor’s favorite
eunuch sob with envy. McHenry is Assistant
Superintendent for Business Services for the
County Office of Education in Santa Clara
County, California.
Right at the top of its front page, the
“Superintendent’s Bulletin” admits that McHenry
has completed “the extensive nine-month Sloan
Program offered by the Stanford School of
Business.” (For educationists, anything that can be
knocked off with a little inservicing is intensive; if
it takes a little more time, and a lot more money,
they call it extensive.) Now, McHenry “has taken
on the added responsibility of coordinating all
planning,” and “he will be using the techniques
Aha! The whole scenario. The potential. The
resources for the potential. More, much more,
than a mere needs assessment. But gently!
Nothing extensive. The needs in the field will
keep. First you have to start to find out those
attitudes out there, the attitudes for need and
provision. (Could there be any against?) Not an
easy job. Might take years. None of them
extensive.
So what did we tell you? The man must be a
linker!
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Please don’t laugh at a linker. Without linkers
there couldn’t be any county superintendents, who
can hardly be expected to superintend the district
superintendents all by themselves. And those
superintendents need linkers, both to link with the
county linkers and to look at the whole scenario in
superintending the attitudes for need and
provision among the principals and their linkers.
And all of those people need offices, and
secretaries, and Mr. Coffee machines. Quality
education doesn’t come cheap, y’know.
[VI:4, April 1982]
whose “works” were among those to be seen last
May at Johnson State College in Johnson,
Vermont. One of our agents was there, of course,
and sent in copies of the artists’ statements of—
well, of something, no doubt, but of what, it’s
hard to say. Mostly they identified the signifiers
as practiced eliminators of the signified.
The most practiced is probably a certain James
Welling. He is serious. He doesn’t even put
quotation marks around “work.” He doesn’t do
works anyway. He seeks productions. Here is part
of a production he found:
My work challenges the photographic ethos
wherein the camera witnesses mundane details
of appearance. I seek a photographic production
which evokes as much as it reveals, and which
resists the intelligence as long as possible. To
shear the photograph of representational
references produces an image of multivalent
significances.
Camera Obscura
My photographs establish the iconic,
dramatic and psychological roles of
contemporary high fashion photography. In
other words, my intent is to identify the
signifier, while eliminating the signified,
simultaneously creating an independent
“work.”
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss
man schweigen.
That, at least, settles an old controversy in one
special case. One picture that resists the
intelligence is worth forty-eight words that do
likewise. So art does instruct and delight after all!
[VI:7, October 1982]
WITTGENSTEIN
probably had something
much subtler in mind when he came up with that
famous line, but the only translation we can
manage just now is: If you don’t know what the
hell you’re talking about, maybe you ought to
keep your trap shut.
Not bad for a logical positivist, eh? But there is
another and far zippier school of, well, not exactly
“thought,” but of something, surely, in which the
counterpart of W’s Proposition Seven reads: You
got to I-DEN--tify the Signifier, E-LIM--inate the
Signified, don’t mess with Mr. Inbetween.
In schools, this persuasion has provided us
Intrapersonal Appreciation through Holistic
Writing, a form of Primal Screed Therapy in
which the student lets it all hang out and the
teacher pronounces it all peachy. In art, it has
brought us what is so insignificantly expressed
(which is the way to do it) in the passage above:
that nouvelle vague of Gaga, Son of Dada.
That utterance is the “work” (and we joyfully
endorse the iconic role of her quotation marks) of
one Vikky Alexander, a photographer, some of
Politics and the Eglinsh Language
“Our civilization is decadent and our
language—so the argument runs—must
inevitably share in the general collapse. It
follows that any struggle against the abuse
of language is a sentimental archaism, like
preferring candles to electric light or hansom
cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the
half-conscious belief that language is a
natural growth and not an instrument which
we shape for our own purposes.”
The bottom line objection against industrysponsored educational materials is how many
more products the company will sell as a result.
The multiplicity of commodities, as Ivan Illich
criticizes, induces a new kind of poverty . . .
Though
corporate-sponsored
teaching
materials in many subject areas are responding
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to the needs of a relevant curriculum, they
might also be viewed as expedient and
defensive public relations in vested ideologies.
WE
have decided to begin memorial
observances of 1984 a little bit early, since such
subversive activities may not be permitted when
1984 rolls around. The epigraph above, however,
is not from 1984 but from a celebrated essay,
“Politics and the English Language,” in which
Orwell considers mendacious and mindless
language far more common and insidious than the
dramatic and perhaps too obviously perverted
Newspeak of 1984. The other passages, written in
the Eglinsh language, are all from Hucksterism in
the Classroom: A Review of Industry Propaganda
in Schools, by one Sheila Harty. Fortunately for
Sheila Harty, Orwell did not live to read this
book. He would have found even “industry
propaganda” less reprehensible than school
Eglinsh, for industrialists, unlike “educators,”
have never promised to devote themselves to the
life and work of the mind.
Whether Sheila Harty will ever read “Politics
and the English Language” we cannot say, but it
seems unlikely. She doesn’t really have to, you
see, for her book has already been awarded, by
some other people who seem never to have read
that essay, what the National Council of Teachers
of Eglinsh, out of the serene presumptuousness
that ignorance alone can bestow, the George
Orwell Award for Distinguished Contributions to
Honesty and Clarity in Public Language.
We have so far, as many readers will remember,
done nothing more about the NCTE than to
demonstrate its culpability in the mishap at Three
Mile Island, the aborted raid into Iran, and one
trifling collision of a Metroliner and a work train
that didn’t even kill anyone, but now it’s obvious
that we have to stop coddling those people. And
we also notice that this weird award comes, to be
precise, from the NCTE’s Committee on Public
Doublespeak, an especially shifty bunch. They’re
the ones who smugly hand out brickbats for the
silly and devious language of businessmen,
bureaucrats,
politicos,
and
Pentagon
spokespersons (which term the NCTE approves),
but never seem to notice the inane cant of the
educationists or even the trendy jargon of Eglinsh
teachering. They wax mighty wroth at “enhanced
radiation devices,” but they’ll not drum out of the
corps those experts “thoroughly trained in
grammar, usage, and linguistics,” who tell us, in
their report on the Third National Writing
Assessment:
While there may be a sense of sections within
the piece of writing, the sheer number and
variety of cohesion strategies bind the details
and sections into a wholeness.
In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell
cites and discusses examples of the “slovenly . . .
language that makes it easier for us to have
foolish thoughts.” Grim as Orwell’s vision for the
future was, he never dreamed that we would one
day actually have to worry about gross and
obvious solecisms in the public language of
supposedly educated people. The faults in his
examples do not include such grammatical
gaucheries as “bottom line is how” or the pathetic
baffled-freshman-trying-to-sound-fancy “as Ivan
Illich criticizes.”* But even without such crudities,
Harty’s prose displays all the perversions of
language that Orwell named: avoidable ugliness,
staleness of imagery, and lack of precision.
Orwell was more specific. He discussed the
routine use of the dying metaphor, that
involuntary verbal twitch that tells us “that the
writer is not interested in what he is saying.” That
seems at first an unlikely charge, especially in
polemic writing, but having an interest in a cause
is not the same thing as being interested in what
you are saying. It is exactly the former that does
lead to the thoughtless recitation of cant and stock
phrases; it is the latter that demands thoughtful
attention. Was it out of thoughtful attention that
Harty chose to characterize an otherwise
unspecified attribute as “responding to needs,” or
was it out of her own habitual responding to the
stimulus of conventional educationistic jargon?
Was it after a judicious consideration of
alternatives or after a jerk of the knee that she
decided to distinguish one certain objection from
*
Poor Orwell assumed, naturally, that that sort of
language was not the problem and would never get past
editors anyway. He could never have guessed that
whole generations of editors (and countless other
innocents) would be taught, by the NCTE and allied
forces, that a persnickety preoccupation with accuracy
is an elitist device for the repression of democratic
virtues like self-esteem and creativity.
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all others by describing it as “the bottom line
objection”?†
It was not out of skillful attentiveness but out of
its opposite, routine thoughtlessness, that Harty
ended up with “bottom line” at all, placidly
content, apparently, with a particularly
inappropriate jargon term borrowed from the
enemy. It is out of that same thoughtlessness that
the authors of Orwell’s bad examples litter their
prose with terms almost completely lacking in
meaning [and that] do not point to any
discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected
to do so by the reader.” Harty would know, if she
bothered to think about it at all, that her readers
would accept “relevant curriculum” and even
“vested ideologies” just as uncritically as she
does.
Enough. You can do the rest of this yourself.
Reread Orwell’s essay. Even in those tiny
fragments of Sheila Harty’s prose, you will easily
find all the items listed in Orwell’s “catalogue of
swindles and perversions.” We have to get on
with frying the big fish, the one who gives out
prizes in Orwell’s name for such rubbish.
Before it was catapulted into national
prominence by being mentioned in The
Underground Grammarian, the National Council
of Teachers of Eglinsh was an obscure special
interest lobbying club (a vested ideology, if you
prefer). Its one little claim to fame arose, strange
to say, from what had to be either ignorance or a
deliberate rejection of Orwell’s most important
assertion about language. Where Orwell thought
language not “a natural growth” but “an
instrument which we shape for our own
purposes,” the NCTE, in a time of troubles, made
political points for itself (coincidentally taking its
members off a hook and reducing their workloads
at the same time) by announcing that every
student had a right to a language of his own. Thus,
to require of students the spelling, punctuation,
grammar, and syntax of the “ruling class” was to
deprive them of their rights.
Such logic would not have delighted Orwell. It
finds the language of the student a “natural
growth,” like acne, and then proposes to protect
him from the oppressive demands of conventional
English because language is an instrument shaped
for some purpose.
But that doesn’t trouble the NCTE. What, after
all, is logic? Just another tricky instrument
contrived out of language. They don’t care about
Sheila Harty’s prose, which reveals nothing more
than the state of her mind; they love her
sentiments, which show that her heart is in the
right (which is to say “left”) place.
Well, they may be sorry. Those greedy
merchants may just this once put principle before
profit and cut off the free supply of charts and
filmstrips and brochures, and millions of teachers
all over America will find themselves desperately
trying to figure out what a teacher deprived of
teaching materials is supposed to do in a
classroom.
[V:4, April 1981]
X
The Political
Worth of Ignorance
The Answering of Kautski
†
Does she mean to say, as her garbled syntax
suggests—”the bottom line objection . . . is how many
more products the company will sell”—that increased
sales are the worst possible result of “industry
propaganda” in the schools? You would think that a
pack of Eglinsh teachers, most of whom live on money
taken from taxpayers, would favor flourishing
industries and a vigorous economy. You might even
think that the same people, who are devoted, of course,
to the intellectual life and the freedom of the mind,
might fear some even graver (or bottomer line)
consequences of propaganda—any propaganda—in the
classroom.
Why should we bother to reply to Kautski?
He would reply to us, and we would have to
reply to his reply. There’s no end to that. It
will be quite enough for us to announce that
Kautski is a traitor to the working class, and
everyone will understand everything.
Nikolai Lenin
TYRANNY is always and everywhere the same,
while freedom is always various. The well and
truly enslaved are dependable; we know what they
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will say and think and do. The free are quirky.
Tyrannies may be overt and violent or covert and
insidious, but they all require the same thing, a
subject population in which the power of the word
is dulled and, thus, the power of thought occluded
and the power of deed brought low. That’s why
Lenin’s bolshevism and American educationism
have so much in common.
“Give me four years to teach the children,’’ said
Lenin, “and the seed I have sown will never be
uprooted.’’ He wasn’t talking about reading,
writing, and arithmetic. He wanted only enough of
such skills so that the workers could puzzle out
their quotas and so that a housebroken
bureaucracy could get on with the business of
rural electrification. Our educationists call it basic
minimum competency, and they hope that we’ll
settle for it as soon as they can cook up some way
of convincing us that they can provide it. For
Lenin, as for our educationists, to “teach the
children’’ is to “adjust’’ them into some ideology.
Lenin understood the power of that ready refuge
from logical thought that is called in our schools
the “affective domain,’’ the amiable Never-never
Land of the half-baked, to whom anything they
name “humanistic’’ is permitted, and of whom
skillful scholarship and large knowledge are not
required. Lenin approved of the “teaching’’ of
values and the display, with appropriate captions,
of socially acceptable “role models.’’ He knew all
too well the worth of behavior modification. He
knew that indoctrination in “citizenship’’ is safer
than the study of history, and that a familiarity
with literature is not conducive to the
wholehearted pursuit of career objectives in the
real-life situation, or arena.
On the other hand, Lenin knew that there was
little risk that coherent thought could erupt in
minds besieged by endless prattle about the
clarification of values. He knew that reiterated
slogans can dull even a good mind into a stupor
out of which it will never arise to overthrow the
slogan-makers. In this, our educationists have
followed him assiduously, justifying every new
crime against freedom of language and thought by
mouthing empty slogans about “quality
education.’’
“Most of the people,’’ Lenin wrote, not in
public, of course, but in a letter, “just aren’t
capable of thinking. The best they can do is learn
the words.’’ If that reminds you of those bleating
sheep in Animal Farm, try to forget them, and
think instead of the lowing herds of pitiable
teacher-trainees, many of whom began with good
intentions and even with brains, singing for their
certificates dull dirges of interpersonal interaction
outcomes enhancement and of change-agent skills
developed in time-action line. Lenin’s contempt
was reserved for the masses. These educationists,
pretenders to egalitarianism, hold even their own
students in contempt, offering them nothing but
words.
If you think it too rash to charge our
educationists even as unwitting agents of tyranny
and thought control, consider these lines from a
recent proclamation of the Association of
California School Administrators:
“Parent choice’’ proceeds from the belief that
the purpose of education is to provide individual
students with an education. In fact, educating
the individual is but a means to the true end of
education, which is to create a viable social
order to which individuals contribute and by
which they are sustained. “Family choice’’ is,
therefore, basically selfish and anti-social in that
it focuses on the “wants’’ of a single family
rather than the “needs’’ of society.
So what do you think? Would it suit Lenin?
And if you’d like to object, you’ll see that these
people also know how to answer Kautski. They’ll
just pronounce you an elitist, and everybody will
understand everything.
[III:8, November 1979]
The Necks and Minds of the People
THIS
month in Belgrade, the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
will meet to blather about the report of its
commission on “the news media.” That report
suggests, among other outrages, that the press
ought to promote, and perhaps ought to be
required to promote, the “social, cultural,
economic and political goals set by governments.”
We’re not the least bit surprised. That’s exactly
the kind of idea you can expect from an outfit
calling itself “educational.”
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“Education” once meant liberation, a condition
available to those led forth (educati) out of some
restraint or captivity. We once assumed that
ignorance and unreason, although natural, were
fetters that might be broken through the
accumulation of knowledge and the practice of
logical thought. We imagined that this trap of
reflexive twitches might be transformed into the
examined life.
Now it is otherwise, and “education” can be best
understood as an inoculation, which, if it takes,
will protect you from something much worse:
reeducation. But it usually takes. Where once a
tyrant had to wish that his subjects had but one
common neck that he might strangle them all at
once, all he has to do now is to “educate the
people” so that they will have but one common
mind to delude.
Even in its less malevolent forms, education has
become a process intended not to increase
knowledge and foster thought but to engender
feelings. Sellers see no absurdity in claiming to
“educate” buyers. Politicians are eager to
“educate” voters. And our schools have taken up
institutionalized apologetics in the cause of values
clarification and social adjustment through
consciousness raising. In short, American public
education is exactly what UNESCO wants us to
promote, one of those “social, cultural, economic
and political goals set by government.” We will
decline.
We hear noises from educationists, and
especially from unionists in education, about the
“duty” of the press to stop knocking and start
boosting, by running, perhaps, some cheery
articles about boldly innovative (relevant) bulletin
boards and the latest test scores, which may
suggest that many eleventh graders are now only
three years behind in reading. Now is the time, we
hear, to “restore public confidence in the schools.”
That invitation is the same as UNESCO’s, and,
considering its source, nakedly self-serving as
well as ominous. Again, we decline.
Public education, no less than the Marine Corps
or the Internal Revenue Service, is a creature of
government and an instrument of its policies. Its
meager remnant of “civilian control,” the elected
school board, has been effectively disenfranchised
by the mandates of government, which leave little
uncontrolled. Public education serves one master,
and that master is rich and powerful. Those who
clamor for the restoration of confidence in the
public schools can, with the mighty resources at
their disposal, and not money alone, but the power
and prestige of officialdom, easily provide that for
themselves. They can easily “educate the public”
into warm feelings of respect for the schools,
especially since those whose values stand in need
of clarification are mostly victims of the schools,
unskilled in thought and poor in knowledge.
When they do that—indeed, as they do that, for
they are always at it in one way or another—it is
only the press that can put weights in the other
pan of the scale, citing facts and exploring
meanings.
“The functionaries of every government,” wrote
Jefferson, “have propensities to command at will
the liberty and property of their constituents.” Is
that any less true when the “functionaries of
government” just happen to be bureaucrats in
some department of “education”? Have they not
commanded our property, in countless billions,
only to squander it on fads and gimmicks and
nonsensical “research” and lucrative consultancies
for others of their tribe? Have they not
commanded our liberty and our very persons in
the cause of ideological adjustment? How long
would we bear such intrusive and manipulative
behavior in other functionaries of government, in
the Coast Guard, for example, or the Motor
Vehicle Bureau?
How long? Only so long as we remain ignorant
of what they are doing and thoughtlessly
uncritical about its meaning. Jefferson went on:
There is no safe deposit for them [liberty and
property] but with the people themselves; nor
can they be safe with them without information.
Where the press is free, and every man able to
read, all is secure.
It is noteworthy that the people who want the
press to promote the schools, thus mitigating the
first of Jefferson’s conditions for the security of
all, are the very ones who have so egregiously
failed to provide the second: universal literacy.
On the other hand, of course, Lenin opposed
freedom of the press. Why, he asked, should
government that is “doing what it believes is right
allow itself to be criticized?” His values were
clarified.
[IV:6, September 1980]
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Nox quondam, nox futura?
Students do not read, write and do arithmetic
as well as they used to because they can get
along quite nicely without these skills. . . .
Americans are finding that they need to rely
less and less on “basic skills” to find out
what they want to know and what they want
to do. Our basic skills are declining
precisely because we need them less.
[Peter Wagschal, Futurist, University of
Massachusetts]
YEAH. And that’s not all! Just you take a good
look at the standard American dogs and cats. They
live pretty damn well, tolling not, neither
spinning, and they’ve never even heard of stuff
like reading, writing, and arithmetic. They “do
quite nicely without those skills,” and so do
tropical fish and baboons. And so, too, did black
slaves and Russian serfs, and all those
marvelously skillful and industrious ancestors of
us all who gathered nuts and roots and killed
small rodents with sticks. They all knew everything they needed to know.
We would probably never have heard of Peter
Wagschal, or of his neato Ouija Board Studies
Program, if it hadn’t been for one Larry Zenke, a
pretty neato guy himself. Zenke is Superintendent
of Schools in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where men are
still men. Did he quail when the national
achievement test scores, which used to be quite
good in that prosperous and orderly city, hit new
lows last fall? Nosirree. When taxpayers
grumbled, did he ignominiously promise to do
better? And when the Tulsa Tribune started
shooting off its editorial mouth about “fads” and
“anti-academic garbage,” did Zenke tiptoe away
into the piloting of experiential remediation
enhancement parameters?
No way. Not in Oklahoma. In the finest frontier
fashion, he stood up tall in the middle of Main
Street at high noon and told the unruly rabble that
maybe they’d like to talk it over, before doing
anything hasty, with his pal, Pete (The Persuader)
Wagschal, who somehow just happened to drift
into town. True grit.
Then, having (by proxy) brought light to the
benighted fuddy-duddies of Tulsa, Zenke, who
obviously knows more than he lets on, laid a little
groundwork for the defense of next year’s test
scores: “Wagschal even suggests that 50 years
from now we could be the smartest, most
knowledgeable society that has ever existed, and
yet be largely illiterate.”
The italics are Zenke’s, not ours, and we’re
grateful for them. We have often wondered what
kind of an idea it would take to make a school
superintendent excited about the life of the
intellect.
And a dandy idea it is, especially for all those
much misunderstood “educators,” saddled (for
now) with the thankless (and difficult) task of
teaching what no one will need to know when the
bright age dawns. All that burnout and stress! And
for what? For nothing more than an arcane and
elitist social grace no more necessary in a truly
“knowledgeable society” than the ability to play
polo, or the lute.
And how, you ask, will people who are “largely
illiterate” come to amass all that knowledge?
Well, don’t you worry, bless your heart. Someone
will probably be quite willing to tell them what to
know, even if it means all the trouble and expense
of attaching loudspeakers to every lamp-post in
America.
The teachers, then, will be liberated to do what
the teacher academies train them to do. Zenke
foretells:
Teachers, for example, will no longer be
disseminators of cognitive information—
machines will do that. Teachers will be program
developers and/or facilitators of group
membership,
helping
students
develop
interaction skills. Some educators, of course,
will be found too rigid to survive this
metamorphosis, but those who do will find
excitement and fulfillment in their new
“teaching roles.”
And that will be just dandy too. Happy, happy,
the teachers of tomorrow, at long last fulfilled and
excited! Freed forever from the stern constraints
of the tiny smatterings of mere information still
incongruously expected of teachers, the
facilitator-trainees of the future won’t have to take
any of those dull and irrelevant “subjects” that
now impede their growth as professionals and
their group membership development. They’ll be
able to spend all their time in the enhancement of
their interaction skills, so that they can go forth
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and facilitate the same for little children. (Those
cunning tots, of course, do have to be educated,
you know, so that they will sit quietly in
organized groups when it’s time to hear some
knowledge from the loudspeaker.) And the
training program for superintendents of schools
will be even more exciting and fulfilling. There’s
just no counting the skills that they can get along
nicely without.
Which is it you’ve lost, Tulsans, your spirit or
your minds? Could it be both? Do you lie awake
in the still watches of the night worrying about
those godless communists who are panting to
nationalize oil? Do you fear that bleeding hearts
will take away the guns by which you fancy that
you won and may yet preserve your liberty? Pooh,
Tulsans, pooh.
The most dangerous threat to your liberty, the
one that has by far the best chance of turning you
all into docile clods, is right there in Tulsa. Think,
dammit! Do you imagine that foreign enemies of
this nation could devise for your children a more
hideous and revolting destiny than the one so
blithely envisioned—and as an exoneration, no
less—by the superintendent of schools? Do you
yawn and turn to the sports section, citizens of
Tulsa, when the man whom you have hired to
oversee the growth of understanding and
judgment in your children airily tells you that in a
palmier day they will have no need of the literacy
that alone can give those powers? Do you shrug
when he tells you that the children will be spared
the burden of whatever “cognitive information”
they don’t actually need, which must obviously,
since the children will have no powers of
judgment, be chosen by someone like Zenke? Do
you, like Zenke, dream of the day when no one
will be able to read our Constitution, but it won’t
matter, because the machines provided by the
government schools will tell us all we really need
to know about it? Can you think of something to
say to those teachers, and superintendents, who
are not excited and fulfilled with leading young
minds into the ways of understanding and
thoughtful discretion, and who arc unrigid
enough, flaccid and limp enough, not only to
survive but to hail as liberation their
metamorphosis into developers and facilitators?
Does it not occur to you that the inculcation of
“interaction skills” for the purpose of “group
development” is exactly the opposite of an
education, by which a mind can find its way out
of group-think and the pet promulgations of
collectivisms? And in short, Tulsans, what are
those strange black boxes we see on your
lamp-posts? What soothing message have they
recited, even as you slept? How is it, O Pioneers,
that you are not mad as hell?
Oklahoma is much changed, but the descendants
of the settlers still like to watch the hawk making
lazy circles in the sky. Their bird-lore, however, is
not what it was. In fact, there’s hardly a damn one
of them that can tell a hawk from a vulture
nowadays.
[VI:1, January 1982]
Children of Perez
WE
were sitting around minding our own
business, thinking of bilingual education and the
perpetual preservation of absolutely everyone’s
cultural heritage, however loathsome, when the
New York Times suddenly told us about Demetrio
Perez, Jr., a Cuban émigré who has become a City
Commissioner in Miami.
Perez is mad as hell because Martin Bregman,
who produced Serpico, intends to make a movie
about a Cuban émigré who makes it big in Miami
as a drug peddler. From one side of his mouth,
Perez says that this will “reflect badly” on
Cubans, but the other side is not interested in
Cubanity; it says that the movie would be dandy if
the drug peddler were a communist Cuban. (Perez
would also settle for a Jewish drug peddler, since
he makes no objection to the fact that there are
many such in the same movie.) And furthermore,
Perez didn’t like Serpico either. He says that “it
tried to affect the credibility of the New York City
Police Department.” Accordingly, he has drawn
up a draft resolution that would keep Bregman
from filming his movie in sun-drenched Miami.
This is what we wonder: Does the political
philosophy of Demetrio Perez, Jr., flow from the
values inherent in a “cultural heritage” that our
own government is busily doing all that it can to
preserve in the schools, or is the man just some
kind of a fool who has not thought about what he
said? We had better hope the latter; the former
promises the death of the Republic.
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In either case, we’d like to send a message to
Perez. Here it is:
Remember always, Perez, that it was from that
land to this that you fled, whatever your reasons.
And that you found this land worth fleeing to tells
us something about that cultural heritage and this
one. Few flee from this to that, Perez. Few flee
into societies built on long ages of obedience to
traditional orthodoxy and humble respect for
authority, societies where some factions are not
subject to being “badly reflected” upon, where no
one would even try—for it is the very trying,
successful or not, that you have condemned—to
fool around with the credibility of the police, and
where movie-makers do exactly as they are told
by City Commissioners.
In the cultural heritage that you chose not to
leave behind at the border, it has indeed always
been true that some people are protected, and by
law as well as by custom, not only from injury but
even offense. So it is that you seek for some
people, policemen and non-communist Cubans,
special protection, which must place special
restrictions on all other people. That arrangement
is abhorrent to our cultural heritage, in which “it
is our Right, it is our Duty” to oppose with
measures far sterner than offense any who would
institute it among us.
And that means you.
The founders of this Republic, one of whom
wrote the words you didn’t recognize, were not
ignorant of the political theories implicit in your
cultural heritage. They knew them well, all too
well. And they despised them and rejected them
utterly. And they gave us, confirmed us in, a
heritage that flows not, like yours, from Canossa,
but from Runnymede. And that was damned lucky
for you, Perez.
You are probably not vicious, but only ignorant,
to propose for us the very political principles by
which one gang of tyrants came to oust another in
Cuba. The perpetual recurrence of usurpation and
counter-usurpation does seem embedded in that
cultural heritage of yours, doesn’t it? And if it is
not embedded in ours, if we have not suffered the
bloody grand right-and-left of princes, priests, and
proles panting after privilege, there must be a
reason. You could come to know and understand
that reason, Perez, and you should. It is your
Duty.
We welcome you to this land, but you can’t
bring Cuba, neither your Cuba nor anyone else’s.
Now that you are one of us, and by choice, it is
our cultural heritage, in which the preservation of
a movie-maker’s Right is a city commissioner’s
Duty, that you must struggle to defend.
Frankly, Perez, we do not expect you to
understand this message. But we hope you’ll try,
if only for the sake of your children, and their
children. For the day may well come, through the
sheer force of numbers combined with the
corrosive labors of our sycophantic educationists,
when your cultural heritage will outweigh ours. In
that happy day, your dreams will be fulfilled. No
one will try to “affect the credibility” of the
police.
Movie-makers
will
obey
city
commissioners.
And in that day, Perez, to what new land will
your children flee?
[VI:7, October 1982]
And furthermore…
WE had fewer testy responses than expected to
“The Children of Perez.” Two readers wrote to
say that such matters were beyond the scope (and
they may have meant beyond the understanding as
well) of this journal.
But the dangerous doctrines of a Perez, and the
ideology out of which they flow, are protected
from critical analysis in our schools, which think
it good to persuade all the children into an
undiscriminating “appreciation” of all known
cultural heritages and “alternative lifestyles,”
without consideration of their implicit principles
or lack of them. We approach that time when the
educationists’ already traditional neglect of “mere
facts” like the provisions of our Constitution will
be justified anew by the fact—which they won’t
call “mere”—that somebody might be offended
by those provisions. As Perez now is.
Such a concern is not “beyond our scope,”
whatever that may be. Nor is it beyond anyone’s
scope. And that brings us to “understanding.”
The search for understanding is the purpose of
the critical examination of language. A scrupulous
attention to mechanics and convention is only a
paltry fussiness unless it reveals how and why
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those who seek admission to the greater mysteries
will advance all the better through practice in the
lesser. We want the schools to teach the skills of
language not because that will make the students
more genteel, but because it just might make them
more thoughtful, and thus more likely to
recognize and repudiate public displays of
ignorance and unreason. Such displays, often
further tainted by pandering mendacity, are the
very substance of our politics and the chief agents
of mindless factionalism. We are not going to wait
until our Perezes dangle their participles. Their
words are enough. To inquire into them is our
right and duty.
[VI:8, November 1982]
Jack and the Beanstalk, by Joanne Greenberg,
provides a familiar framework which allows
elementary students to practice decision making
while learning the basic principles of our legal
system relating to fairness and honesty. The
suggested activities encourage students to
explore their own opinions about fairness.
Doesn’t that sound like fun? How many
“opinions about fairness” do the cunning little
tykes have? Are many against it? Will they be set
right by a merry bout of decision making? Will
the teachers’ manual that comes with this material
teach the teachers those “basic principles of our
legal system relating to fairness and honesty”?
But this is more than a pre-pre-law material. It
is “relevant and motivating reading matter”:
The activities in each chapter not only motivate
the students to think critically, view situations
from various perspectives, and form
conclusions, but also apply language art skills
such as spelling, handwriting, and creative
writing.
Joanne the Jack-Killer
or, the Giant’s Jolly Christmas
WE really wanted, at this festive time of year, to
don our gay apparel; but it turns out that you can’t
do that anymore without being mistaken for a
consciousness-raising band of role-players
cheerily relating to an alternative lifestyle. So we
decided simply to wish for peace on earth to men
of good will. That proved wrong too, so we
changed it to persons of good will. And even that
proved wrong, for it was sure to offend a
substantial and much maligned minority which
should be appreciated and related to rather than
demeaned by exclusion from our prayers.
It was a certain Joanne Greenberg who
reminded us, and just in time, that persons of ill
will have feelings too, you know. And rights.
Greenberg seems to be, a bit to our surprise, we
must admit, the author of Jack and the Beanstalk.
Really. It says so right here in this nifty brochure
from West Publishing Company Inc., in Mineola,
New York. It says, too, that Greenberg has written
thirty other “instructional materials.” This, her
latest material, is not actually called a book in the
brochure, but it is obviously meant to look like
one, and it costs $5.75, a bit steep for a material.
But it surely is “instructional.”
It’s not easy to make children hate reading
stories, but this Greenberg is a professional.
Here’s how she does it:
Just imagine. There you sit, reading a book,
dwelling awhile in a world strangely truer than the
world, and at the end of every chapter, along
comes this meddlesome schoolteacher who makes
you practice decision making and “learn” legal
principles. You have just watched Huck hastily
covering the dead face of his friend, and this
busybody, whose own “opinions” are slogans left
over from teacher-school courses in interpersonal
relating and values clarification workshops, calls a
rap-session to help you explore your opinions.
Emma is stuffing her mouth with the poisonous
powder, and some officious employee of the state,
whose mouth drips the cant of life adjustment and
behavior modification in the affective domain,
“motivates” you to view situations from various
perspectives,” and then to “apply” spelling.
And when Jack lays his axe to the root of the
beanstalk, will this Joanne Greenberg come
barging in with her explorations and activities and
maybe a neat ecological-awareness message from
Smoky the Bear? Well, no. She comes up with
something worse:
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One major change has been made: the Giant is
not killed in the end, to avoid a violent act
which would have no bearing on the issues
being examined.
These school people hate literature. It stands for
everything that they stand against. A work of
literature comes from one, solitary mind, not from
the consensus of a collective. It is an unequivocal
assertion that this is so. It abides, or it dies, but it
will not negotiate. It comes before us neither as a
supplicant nor a defendant, but as a judge. It cares
nothing for our favorite notions or our
self-esteem. And it offends in us what most
deserves offense—petulant sectarian touchiness,
facile social supposition, and especially smug
self-righteousness. Thus it is that the
educationists’ literature is not the real thing. They
must abbreviate it, or amend it, or—and this is
their usual practice—elucidate it, lest their
students fail to appreciate correctly its relevance
to “the issues being examined.” And should the
work at hand have nothing to do with the issues
they want to examine, they must concoct an
“instructional material” and call it Jack and the
Beanstalk.
Little children know, even blithering idiots
know—except for one tribe—that the Giant must
die. The story is about the Good and the Bad,
which, in the outer world of the social order, must
be always cutting deals. That sad necessity is sad;
it is not to our credit. When we forget to be
ashamed of that compromise, when we ordain it
as a principle of the inner life of the mind, when
we learn to flatter ourselves for the “liberality” out
of which we tolerate the intolerable, and the
“flexibility” with which we gladly bend to every
gust of popular novelty, then we aren’t even
cutting any deals. We are simply capitulating.
Jack does not capitulate. Nor does he cut a deal
by accepting, instead of justice, an “enhanced
interpersonal relationship” with brutal greed. He
does not “view the situation from various
perspectives,” but seizes what is truly his, not by
“the basic principles of our legal system relating
to fairness and honesty,” whatever the murky
notions intended by that awkward phrasing, but by
the one deepest principle of Lawfulness itself.
And it is Unlawfulness that dies with the Giant.
And Tyranny, too, dies with the Giant, for that
is another of the many names of Unlawfulness.
That is why children are not frightened by the
death of a brutal monster. They know Tyranny
when they see it, for they see it regularly. It is the
continued life of the monster, watching and
waiting, that frightens them.
Children are little, and cannot live by their own
efforts. They need order and principle in the
world, lest they perish, in one way or another.
When they find their destinies in the hands of
unruly and self-indulgent parents, and teachers so
unprincipled that they think it “humanistic” to
“view” greed and force “from various
perspectives” they recognize the Giant. While the
Tyrant lives, how can they live? Must they always
cut the same old deal, remake themselves after the
Giant’s image and likeness, lest he sniff out
foreign blood in them? Will no one save them?
Who can stand, when even the grown-ups prissily
reject a violent act which would have no bearing
on the issues,” against strong tyranny?
Jack—that’s who.
“One cannot understand the least thing about
modern civilization,” said George Bernanos, “if
one does not first realize that it is a universal
conspiracy to destroy the inner life.” Greenberg’s
revision is surely one of those least things,
although probably an involuntary ideological
twitch rather than a deliberately conspiratorial
deed. She is simply “staying in line,” which is the
first and great commandment of all collectivisms.
And the second is like unto it: Keep thy neighbor
in line.
And if we send the Giant to the head of the line,
maybe he’ll be nice to us.
[VI:9, December 1982]
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The Mouths of Babes
“Everybody thinks that Russia is the bad
guy. We found out that the U. S. A. is just as
bad because we’re doing a lot of things like
they are, like making nuclear weapons, like
we dropped the first bomb... We got the
whole thing started.”
“To be ignorant of what occurred before you
were born is to remain always a child.”
SHARETEXT™ The Leaning Tower of Babel
The second quotation is from Cicero. It is one of
those sayings that lodge themselves securely in a
quiet corner of the mind, only now and then
nagging for attention and elucidation. The words
seem to have the ring of truth, but what, exactly
and in detail, do they mean?
Our ruminations on that question have been
helped along prodigiously by the first quotation. It
is the “work” of a thirteen-year-old schoolboy
somewhere in Wisconsin. A child. A child whose
teachers have apparently been admitted to the
greater mysteries without having to pass through
the tedious apprenticeship of the lesser. They have
not taught this child much about the natural form
of the sentence, but they have told him who “got
the whole thing started.’
We found this schoolboy’s understanding of
what happened before he was born (which must
be rigorously distinguished from his knowledge of
what happened before he was born) in a column in
the Times & World News of Roanoke, Va., July
11, 1983.
The author, Harold Sugg, a journalist, suggests
that the child might have been given some
knowledge before he was handed an
“understanding”—knowledge about the progress
and intentions of German scientists, about the
well-founded fears of Einstein and other refugees,
Roosevelt’s perfectly prudent reaction to
Einstein’s letter, and Truman’s dilemma,
unresolved to this day, and, like any of history’s
“what if’s,” unresolvable by anything less than the
mind of God.
Regular readers will easily sniff out the source
of the schoolboy’s “understanding.” It is, of
course, the “packet of materials” put out by a
teachers’ union, the National “Education”
Association. That handy-dandy guidebook for
teachers who are ignorant of what occurred before
they were born was “to dispel misconceptions
[specifically in junior high school children] about
nuclear war and the buildup of nuclear arms.”
When we discussed this project last December, we
wondered whether that teachers’ union had come
up with some new and hitherto unsuspected
knowledge, or whether they would dispel
misconceptions in their usual way, i.e., by
modifying children into some new feelings
without bothering about mere knowledge. But, of
course, we didn’t really wonder.
Now that we have some evidence as to their
methods, we want to consider their enterprise
from another point of view.
They did indeed proclaim that their program of
megadeath education was meant to “dispel
misconceptions” in teenagers. What can be the
meaning of that curious qualification? If there
were some line of argument or collection of
knowledge that would in fact dispel
misconceptions about nuclear war in teenagers,
why on earth would it not have precisely the same
effect on anyone of any age?
Surely, knowledge is knowledge, and reason,
reason. There can hardly be several of each,
severally suitable to different ages. Some persons,
to be sure, and no matter what their age, still have
minds so credulous and unpracticed that
knowledge and reason do not touch them, but if
the NEA does in fact command the knowledge
and reason that would dispel misconceptions in
teenagers, then it must be able to do the same for
many of the rest of us.
So why are we left in darkness? Why hasn’t this
union, ordinarily loud in protesting its devotion to
the common good, dispelled all our
misconceptions and brought us, in this most
critical issue, to a national consensus? Why are
some of us still in confusion as to who the good
and the bad guys are and who started it all?
Or, to put it in a more useful way, do you
imagine that those “teachers” would dare to do in
public, before an audience of educated adults,
whatever it was they did to bring that little boy to
his
shallow
and
altogether
pitiable
“understanding” of history?
Do you suppose that the little boy’s teacher
shares his belief? If so, how does such a gullible
and uninformed person get to be a teacher? And if
not, how is such a teacher anything other than a
hypocrite and a molester of children? How else
are we to describe one who would take advantage
of a child’s natural ignorance and pliability in
order to arouse in him certain feelings and beliefs
that will suit the manipulator’s purpose?
Perhaps, however, there is a third possibility
that seems, at first, slightly less horrendous. It
may well be, for such is the standard practice of
those educationists, that the devisers of holocaust
education actually admitted (to themselves, but
certainly not to the rest of us) that such a study
might prove, well, just a bit “advanced” for the
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juvenile mind to understand “correctly,” and thus
in need of some judicious and pedagogically
practicable adjustment. After all, to bring a child
of thirteen to a mature and thoughtful
understanding of so large and vexed an issue
might take years and years! There just isn’t going
to be all that time in our nifty little mini-course.
We’ll have to leave something out, all that science
and history and politics stuff, maybe, all those
confusing mere facts.
Years and years. Yes, that is what it takes even
to begin to form a mature and thoughtful
understanding of any serious human issue, years
and years of finding and ordering knowledge, and
rational inquiry, and living, and paying attention
to living, and always, always, living under the
decent government of vigilant doubt.
The whole story of our educationists can be told
in miniature by the example of this “course” in the
dispelling of misconceptions about a stupendously
complicated issue. They are reluctant to teach
those things that can and should be taught to
children. They do not find that a sufficiently
professional calling. They dream of being priests
and prophets, lofty enlighteners, healers of
disordered young psyches, beneficent agents of
social change. Scorning skill and knowledge as
“minimum,” “basic,” and “mere,” they hustle their
charges into “awarenesses,” “perceptions,” and
“appreciations” of the Great Issues, as though
such sentiments were ways of understanding.
Even when they have faint inklings of the fact that
it does take years and years to seek out mature and
thoughtful understandings, they decide that
children are children, after all, and that for them a
childish and simplified “understanding” will be
quite good enough, and surely better than none at
all.
So it was, for instance, that the boy who was
brought to “understand,” all about nuclear war
was not burdened with the study of history, which
could take up a lot of time and would just confuse
him. And that much is true; there is a lot of
history, of which we can never know more than a
little. “The well of history,” Thomas Mann put it,
“is very deep. Shall we not say that it is
bottomless?” And so it is, as anyone who has
actually studied history can testify. And that is
precisely why we must study it.
The study of history is an antidote to arrogance
and dogmatism, because it reminds us that even
those who have great knowledge, especially those
who have great knowledge, can not agree. It
shows us that the “good guys and bad guys”
theory of history is puerile nonsense, and that we
can no more understand “who started it all” than
we can know what “it all” is.
But our little boy did not read history. He
was instead, as educationists say, “exposed to
social studies.”
The hokey cant of the educationists has at
least this virtue through it they reveal, however
unintentionally, what is really in their minds.
Their routine admission of wanting to “expose”
students to this or that is a way of saying that they
want the children to “catch” something—an
“appreciation,” or an “awareness,” or the most
virulent infection of all, a “right response.”
(A “right response,” in pedagogical theory,
has nothing to do with a “correct answer.” The
latter exists only in the merely cognitive domain,
while the former floats in the affective. The
correct answer, in fact, may actually prevent the
right response, just as that little boy’s right
response might have been prevented had Harold
Sugg been sitting in the back of the class and
obstructing the dispelling of misconceptions with
a few correct answers.)
The swamp of social studies is not deep. It is
shallow, very shallow, fetid and septic. Shall we
not expect that he who drinks of it will catch some
thing? And that little boy in Wisconsin has indeed
caught a “right response,” for his meager
understanding is dearly the understanding that was
intended by those who “instructed” him.
So the third possibility turns out to be not
less but more horrendous than the other two. The
claim that some inquiries that are just too
“advanced” for children to understand can be
simplified or abbreviated so that children can
understand what they can not understand is arrant
nonsense and rank hypocrisy. In this program of
nuclear warfare education, no inquiry at all was
ever intended, no search for understanding
through knowledge, but only the implanting of a
certain belief in the uninformed and acquiescent
minds of children. In Albania, too, the
educationists call that “education.”
If there are issues that children can not
understand because their minds are insufficiently
practiced and informed, and because they have
little experience of living, then they can not
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understand them. Nor have they come to
understand them when they have learned to recite
the opinions of redactors and simplifiers claiming
to be teachers.
And when they have learned that kind of
lesson often enough—how often is that?—they
will slip easily into the condition that Cicero had
in mind: lifelong childhood. Childhood is not best
understood as a time of life, for its time is variable
and indeterminate. Childhood is better understood
as a kind of life, the kind that is simply natural to
those in whom the mind is still credulous and
unpracticed. Such a mind can not seek
understanding by knowledge and rational inquiry,
but will readily accept and recite opinions
delivered by anyone to whom credulousness
grants authority. There is no point in asking, of
the boy in Wisconsin, What did he know and how
did he reason? The useful question would be:
Whom did he heed? He heeded certain other
children, who learned the same lesson in the same
way.
This is the fact that lies at the heart of all of
our troubles in “education,” the fact that must
ultimately defeat all attempts at reform. The
children in the schools are just children, who
might someday, if left unmolested, put away
childish things. But the other people in the
schools, the teachers and teacher trainers, the
educrats and theory mongers, are confirmed
children. They are, indeed and alas, exactly what
they claim to be—”role models.” And they
represent the end of that process to which
schooling is the means: the subversion of
knowledge and reason, stern governors, by bands
of cunning babies, feelings and beliefs.
If we can escape a nuclear calamity only
through some brand of ideological indoctrination
in all our children, then we might inquire as to
whether we should escape it. But thus we will not
escape; we rather make it all the more possible.
Violence is an extremity of unreason, and we do
not escape either unreason or violence by calling
the one to save us from the other.
Nor can we hope that little children who have
been dosed with unreason and praised for
swallowing it will one day, by magic or luck, put
on thoughtfulness and require, of any who would
persuade them, knowledge and reason. If that is a
part of the natural process of growing up, which is
at least questionable, it can obviously be
prevented, and by nothing more than a little
modification in the affective domain and the
relentless display of role models who have already
been suitably modified.
And it is a great pity, for children can learn
from other children. The very teachers that we
now have could easily teach the younger children
things like the skills of language and number,
upon which all mature and thoughtful
understanding must ultimately be founded. They
could lead them into reading the words of the
thoughtful, words to be stored up against need, for
need will surely come. They could treat the
younger children like what they truly are,
inheritors of wealth beyond counting, the great
record of our long struggle to understand “it all,”
which permits no shortcuts.
But that is to say that the smaller children might
someday grow up if the bigger were to grow up
today. What do you suppose the chances are?
[VII:6, October 1983]
As Maine Goes...
The South Portland Board of Education
voted April 11 to introduce a new high
school course. Low Level American
History, starting in September 1984.
The course would be aimed at the “slow
readers or non-readers at the high school,”
Principal Ralph Baxter told the board.
The purpose of the course, Baxter said,
would be to help students achieve the
necessary number of points to graduate. He
said the high school already has similar lowlevel courses in English, math, and science,
the other three subjects required for
graduation.
THAT is the news from Maine, as reported in the
American Journal of South Portland for May 4,
1983, and we have to admit that we are absolutely
astonished (and impressed) by that Ralph Baxter
chap. We would never have dreamed that there
could be a principal so precise in his use of
prepositions. “Non-readers at the high school,” he
calls them, as though they just happened to be
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hanging around in the halls and waiting for
someone to give them diplomas.
And so they are. And they will get those
diplomas sooner or later, but not, as one might
idly suppose, out of the compassionate largesse of
an egalitarian society. Something, to be sure, is
handed to them on a platter, but it’s just a nasty
mess of gristle and grease. On commencement
day, when the new graduates gratefully wag their
tails and lap up the orts, the Ralph Baxters of
educationism wipe their jowls and belch.
In educationistic ideology, there are at least
three
justifications
for
mind-boggling
monstrosities like the courses offered in Maine.
Of two, the educationists are actually aware. The
third, however, can be detected only through
knowledge and reason.
First, there is the body count.
Even in these days, when everyone ought to
know better, you can find an occasional defense
of the schools, usually as a filler in the
neighborhood shoppers’ guide. The apologist is
usually a superintendent dodging flak or an
assistant porseffor of education padding his list of
publications, and the “arguments” are always
exactly the same, always the party line. And one
of them is always the body count.
By counting the bodies, an educationist can
easily prove, by the logic he learned in teacher
school, that the American public schools are not
only better than ever, but also better than any
other nation’s schools. Never in the whole history
of mankind have so many “achieved the necessary
number of points to graduate.”
And then there’s the business of democracy in
action. The schools are democracy in action.
When people are denied diplomas just because
they were never taught to read, all who can read
will become elitists.
The third justification, the one of which the
educationists are possibly not aware, is the
approach of 1984. The schools have certainly
done their best by fostering Doublethink and
Newspeak, and rewriting history as social studies.
They have managed, even without two-way
television, to find out lots of neat stuff about their
students’ feelings and beliefs. They have not yet,
however, provided the One Thing most needed for
the New Day—a sufficient number of proles,
those slow readers and non-readers without whom
1984 just won’t be the real thing. They’re working
on it.
Those who imagine that American education
can be “reformed” would do well to meditate not
on more money for merit pay and computers but
on a child, one child. Any one of the non-readers
of South Portland will do.
Consider him. He is the victim of an injustice,
deprived of the fullness of humanity, the habits
and powers of rational discourse amid the
thoughtful consideration of meaning. And how
can we now deal justly with him? By giving him a
diploma? By denying it, adding insult to injury?
In fact, the injustice can never be undone, as
though it had never befallen him. He is a crooked
branch, having been badly bent as a twig. It would
need wise and mighty efforts even to begin to help
him to grow straight. Who will put forth those
efforts? If the schools were “reformed”
miraculously tomorrow, what good would that be
to him? Or to hosts of others in the same plight?
In the glorious world of tomorrow, when all the
high school graduates can read and reason
thoughtfully, our non-reader from South Portland
will still he a prole, governed, and easily
governed, by unexamined appetites, easily
engendered; led, and easily, by pandering
politicians, flatterers and entertainers of every
sort, and those wheedling behavior modifiers who
made him not only a prole but also a prole full of
self-esteem,
It is the goal of education to deliver us from the
captivity of the unexamined life and out of the
power of persuaders. Those who now offer to
reform education are the persuaders themselves,
the politicians of either stripe, and the social
engineers now running the schools and peddling
garbage like Low Level English for Non-readers,
for which they have already assured the need.
They imagine that education is a process for
producing certain kinds of people for collective
purposes. For the moment, they suppose that the
ultimate boon of education is not the examined
life but the ability to outsell the Japanese.
Our famous excellence commission meditated
not on the dismal destiny of one child, but on a
nation, “a nation at risk,” at risk of not outselling
the Japanese. It will bring forth, therefore, if
anything, only a revised nationalistic “education,”
a modernized program of life-adjustment, this
time with computers. And, when the need arises,
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the school board in South Portland will approve
Ralph Baxter’s proposal for a course in Low
Level Computer Science.
The nature of the injustice done long ago to our
non-reader is exactly this: He was put into a
system that exists not for his sake but only for the
sake of the nation.
The “success” of a school system designed “for
the good of the nation,” as construed by the
government employees who run the schools, is not
to be measured by the lifelong captivity of one
poor clod. Some number of such clods is, in fact,
“for the good of the nation.” They can do the
scutwork and provide employment for
government functionaries in social services. They
will always be crying for the moon and illustrating
“democracy in action” by flocking into the faction
of those who most persuasively promise it. We
can’t have too many, however, lest we fail to
outsell the Japanese. Ending up with just the right
number is an appropriate, and quite sufficient,
goal of a school system that is intended for the
good of the nation. In that great cause, what does
it matter that some poor clod in Maine can’t lead
an examined life, which is probably an over-rated,
and surely a suspiciously elitist, enterprise? He’ll
be all right. We’ll tell him whatever it is he needs
to know. And he may turn out to be a productive
worker, anyway, and thus to serve the good of the
nation after all.
[VII:5, September 1983]
The Children of the State
A general state education is a mere
contrivance for moulding people to be
exactly like one another; and the mould in
which it casts them is that which pleases the
predominant power in the government,
whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an
aristocracy, or the majority of the existing
generation in proportion as it is efficient, it
establishes a despotism over the mind,
leading by natural tendency to one over the
body.
J. S Mill
Sometimes our readers imagine that we go too
far. Once, when we concluded that the American
government school system was exactly what
Lenin ordered, certain readers imagined that we
had gone too far. Later, when we concluded that
religious schools were in no important way
different from government schools, and that what
Luther ordered was even more oppressive than
what Lenin ordered, certain other readers
imagined that we had gone too far.
In fact, however, we never have the space to go
far enough. Of the inane pronouncements and the
sentimental mantras of educationism, we ask one
question, a question that should always be asked
of any proposition, even the most familiar,
especially the most familiar: If this is true, what
else must be true? It is a little question with a big
answer. It throws a wonderful ray of clear light
into sunless stews of superstition all the way from
astrology to the affective domain.
To answer that question, however, is usually an
exasperating chore. It’s difficult enough to puzzle
out exactly what the educationists are saying, and
why they say it, is, therefore, all the harder to
construe. Often, after having worked out the
logical, and horrible, implications of their dicta,
we don’t know whether to indict them for vice or
for folly. It is thus a rare pleasure to discover an
educationist who does not leave us in doubt.
He is a certain William H. Seawell, a professor
of education at the University of Virginia, a
paragon of clarity, a plain speaker in whom there
is no mealy-mouthing, no obliquity, no jargon at
all.
“Each child,” says William H. Seawell,
“belongs to the state.” What could be clearer?
In saying that, Seawell, who is, after all, a paid
agent of the government of a state, was doing
nothing more than what he is paid to do. That
function is called, almost certainly by every
government on the face of the Earth, “Educating
the People.” But Seawell’s forthrightness, in a
matter that ordinarily puts educationists to pious
pussy-footing, suggests that he is no mere timeserver who is just following orders. He sounds
like exactly the kind of agent that any government
most prizes: a True Believer.
And a brave one, too. For he also said, to an
audience of mere citizens, gathered to “celebrate”
the opening of yet another government
schoolhouse in Fort Defiance, Virginia, that the
purpose of “education” is “the training of citizens
for the state so the state may be perpetuated.”
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Although Seawell probably holds to the
orthodox educationistic belief that “truth and
knowledge are only relative”* he seems to have
spoken as one who knew with absolute certainty
that Jefferson had left Virginia forever, and could
not possibly be sitting quietly, horsewhip in hand,
out in the dim back rows of the auditorium. It
could only be out of some such certainty although
ignorance might serve as well—that a man would
dare to admit that “public schools promote civic
rather than individual pursuits,” and to argue from
that, that “only public education can he used to
gain a free society.”
Fort Defiance, eh? Well, times have changed in
Virginia. Our source, The Staunton Leader, a
remarkably restrained newspaper, says nothing at
all about the mere citizens’ reaction to being
educated by Seawell. We have to assume,
however, that even The Leader would have made
some brief mention of the fact if the man had been
tarred and feathered and ridden out of Fort
Defiance on a rail, So that probably didn’t happen.
And that it didn’t is witness to the efficacy of an
“education” designed for the perpetuation of the
state. Such an “education” must see to it that its
victims are habitually inattentive to the meaning
of the words and slogans in which they are
“educated.” No one, it seems, muttered any tiny
dissent when Seawell over-ruled the Constitution
and appointed unto himself and his ilk the task
that many Virginians might have deemed more
suitable to other hands: “We must focus on
creating citizens for the good of society.”
So. We are now to hold these truths to he selfevident: That all citizens are encumbered by the
State that creates them with certain inevitable
burdens, and that among these burdens are a life
of involuntary servitude for the perpetuation of
the State, the liberty to be required by law to learn
from their Creators the worth of the civic and the
nastiness of the individual, and the assiduous
pursuit—and this is Seawell’s parting shot—of
only those pastimes deemed (by agents of
government, we guess) “productive.”
It is possible, of course, that hidden among the
impositions of George III upon the colonies there
were provisions more heinous and tyrannical than
William H. Seawell’s grand design for Educating
From Bloom’s Taxonomy, which we examined last
month. It’s still in force.
*
the People, but damned if we can think of any just
now. And it gives us sadly to wonder.
Some eminently reasonable and well-educated
men found King George’s comparatively mild and
unintrusive intentions nothing less than a “Design
to reduce them under absolute Despotism,” as a
delegate from Virginia put it. But the king never
claimed that he was the creator—and owner—of
his subjects, or that their purpose was the
perpetuation of the state. He did not require the
children to attend schools in which his hired
agents would persuade them as to his notions
about the “good of society.” Nevertheless—and it
suddenly seems strangely unaccountable—those
thoughtful men took up arms against that king.
Was it for this that they delivered us from that?
The citizens of Fort Defiance probably gave
Seawell, at the least, a free feed. Maybe even a
plaque.
Well, not to worry. All this took place long ago
in May of 1981. By now, surely, all the other
educationists will have vigorously dissociated
themselves from Seawell’s eccentric views. As
soon as we hear news of his repudiation, we’ll
pass it right along, lest you fret about the state of
the Republic.
[VII:2, March 1983]
A Lecture on Politics
The state in which the rulers are most
reluctant to govern is always the best and
most quietly governed; and the state in
which they are most eager, the worst.
WE have heard from a faithful, but worried,
reader. He is afraid that Ronald Reagan might
read THE UNDERGROUND GRAMMARIAN and
make use of our arguments for his own devious
purposes. And we have, indeed, often argued that
good schools, cleansed of trashy courses and
parasitic functionaries, would cost less than the
schools we now have.
Strangely enough, our worried reader obviously
did not suggest at all that our arguments are
wrong; he feared only that they might be used by
a wrong person in a wrong cause. And now we are
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worried, for that fear is itself a frightening
reminder of the tremendous power of factional
belief over the freedom of the mind.
If an argument is sound and rational, it is sound
and rational no matter who uses it. If Reagan, or
some other politician, or the Devil himself, should
choose to espouse sound and rational argument,
we would all be better off. But that can not
happen. Politicians—and the Devil— just don’t
work that way.
In fact, if any politician were to adopt our
understanding about the costs of public schooling,
it could only mean that he has decided not to run.
No office seeker, even should he find it true,
would dare to say what we say. We do not fear,
therefore, that we may provide unintended—and
utterly unmerited—aid and comfort either to
Ronald Reagan or to any of his currently
numerous opponents.
What we do fear, however, is a result even
worse than that. Thanks largely to that pussyfooting excellence commission report, whichlooks more and more like a clever ploy to
precisely this end, the future of education in
America may be delivered into the hands of
politicians, the only people around whose
influence on the life of the mind is even more
baleful than that of the educationists. When the
very last returns of the election of 1984 are finally
in, they may well show that the American people
have been persuaded at last not only to accept but
also to approve the notion that the character of
“education” should be determined in the voting
booth. Nothing worse could happen to us.
Among us, the rulers are not reluctant to govern.
In pursuit of office, they will bellow with the herd
in broad daylight, and, in darkness, hunker down
with the wolves. They prosper by persuasion and
the exacerbation of factional discord. Like the
educationists, they prefer to ply their trade in the
misty precincts of “the affective domain,” where
sentiment and belief can he assigned a greater
“moral” power than knowledge and reason,
provided only that they be “worthy sentiment”
and “right belief,” to which every faction lays
claim. Politicians must thus depend upon the
existence of a certain number of citizens who
share similar desires but who neither will nor can
inquire as to whether they should desire what they
desire. Nor do our politicians find it useful to
encourage such inquiry.
All of that may be “only realistic,” but if it is, it
points to certain loathsome realities. It must mean,
a) that Americans have not achieved that
“informed discretion” that Jefferson deemed
essential to a free people, b) that politicians profit
from that lack, and c) that, as to improvements in
the hen-house security system, the foxes will have
some ideas of their own.
For that is exactly what an education is—a
security system that signals the intrusion of
ignorance and unreason. It is education that
unmasks opinion or belief parading as knowledge,
and defrocks persuasion pretending to be logic. It
is our defense against the tyranny of appetite and
ideology, and our only path to self-knowledge and
self-government. It is, in short, exactly the
sovereign remedy for politics as practiced among
us.
We have listened to Reagan, and we have
listened to Mondale, who seems sufficiently
typical of the other pack. They show no sign of
knowing what they mean by “education.”
According to the faction they hope to please, they
take education to be some sort of more or less
practical training in something or other, or an
indoctrination in somebody’s favorite version of
socially acceptable notions, or an incoherent
muddle known as “adjustment to life.” They
address themselves to issues related not to
education but only to the school business, to
schools as agencies of government and
bureaucratic structures. They believe, or pretend
to believe, that the solution lies in this or that,
prayer, or pay, or something.
And one of those men, or someone just like one
of them, will win the presidential election of 1984,
trailing behind him his promises and debts. To
whom then will he turn in the great cause of
excellence and the reform of schooling? Plato?
Jefferson? To anyone who understands education
as the mind’s strong defense against manipulation
and flattery? Will he drive out once and for all, by
denying them their “monies,” the clowns and
charlatans of educationism who have brought us
to this pass? Or will he rather prove that he
“supports education” by handing those innovative
thrusters more monies?
The educationists do claim that they run the
only game in town, that they are the only real
professionals who know all about education. And,
since they are not able to detect irony, they can
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claim with perfectly straight faces that they are the
only ones who can help us, now that we have
gotten ourselves into this mess.
They lie. But politicians are realistic, and they
don’t care that educationists lie. They care only
that the educationists be perceived as panting after
excellence, and that they can manage.
We face nothing less than the ultimate test of
democracy, a sterner test than war itself. The
survival of the nation may be a necessary
condition of individual freedom, but it is certainly
not a sufficient condition. If “democracy” means
rule by those who know best how to please the
uninformed and thoughtless, which is the
condition asserted, and presumably accepted, by
those who excuse politicians as “realistic,” then
we can not be free. We must suffer the tyranny
not only of our own appetites and notions, but of
the appetites and notions of any slim majority of
everyone else. If we tolerate the existence of such
multitudes, we can not be free. And if we permit
the politicians and the educationists to define the
nature and purpose of education according to their
appetites and notions, to say nothing of their track
records, then we will ensure the existence of such
multitudes. And we will never be free.
Democracy is not a form of government that
provides freedom. That it is, is the sort of illusion
easily (and conveniently) induced in the
multitudes who are given pep-rallies in
“citizenship” rather than the disciplined study of
history and politics. But democracy may well be
that form of government that most liberally
permits freedom. Even Aristotle, who had no
illusions about the supposed “rightness” of
multitudes in proportion to their size, was willing
to grant this:
“If liberty and equality, as is thought by some,
are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be
best attained when all persons alike share in the
government to the utmost.”
An uneducated person is simply unable to
“share in the government.” (governing is exactly
what is learned through education. The
uneducated, of whatever rank or station do not
even govern themselves, but simply obey
whatever desires and beliefs they suppose to be
their own. But if they can not govern, they can
certainly rule. And should they be reluctant to do
that, some realistic politician will be delighted to
set them straight.
Jefferson did not commend “informed
discretion” as a graceful adornment for a lucky
few. He prescribed it as a necessary condition for
freedom in a democracy, for he knew that the
latter does not ensure the former. And he
prescribed it for “all persons alike…to the
utmost.”
Well, let’s keep on looking for a bluebird.
Maybe Jefferson was wrong. Maybe we can be
“ignorant and free.” Someday, maybe, we’ll find
out. Maybe as soon as November of 1984.
[VII:5, September 1983]
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